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PREFACE.

If this little book does not supply a want, it
fills, however imperfectly, a gap; for the only
work in the English language on the subject —
Canon Isaac Taylor's " History of the Alphabet "
— is necessarily charged with a mass of technical
detail which is stiff reading even for the student
of graphiology. Moreover, invaluable and indis-
pensable as is that work, it furnishes only a meagre
account of those primitive stages of the art of
writing, knowledge of which is essential for trac-
ing the development of that art, so that its place
in the general evolution of human inventions is
made clear. Prominence is therefore given to this
branch of the subject in the following pages.

In the recent reprint of Canon Taylor's book
no reference occurs to the important materials
collected by Professor Flinders Petrie and Mr.
Arthur J. Evans in Egypt and Crete, the result of
which is to revolutionise the old theory of the
source of the Alphabet whence our own and others
are derived. This opens up a big question for
experts to settle; and here it must suffice to pre-
sent a statement of the new evidence, and to point
out its significance, so that the reader be not taken
into the troubled atmosphere of controversy.
That he may, further, not be distracted by foot-
notes, references to the authorities cited are
printed in the text. E. C.

RosEMONT, ig Carleton Road,
TuFNELL Park, N.

CONTENTS.

I. Introductory

II. The Beginnings of the Alphabet

III. Memory-aids and Picture-writing

(a) Mnemonic .....

(6) Pictorial

{c) Ideographic .....
{d) Phonetic

IV. Chinese, Japanese, and Corean Scripts
V. Cuneiform Writing

VI. Egyptian Hieroglyphics ....

(a) Hieroglyphic Writing . . ,
(i) Hieratic Writing ....
((") Demotic Writing ....

VII. The Rosetta Stone ....
VIII. Egyptian Writin^ in its Relation to Other
Scripts

1 02

105
"3
"5

116

121
142

173

IX. The Cretan and Allied Scripts .

X. Greek Papyri

The Diffusion of the " Phoenician " Alpha-
bet—

(a) Aramean ...... 187

{i>} Sabajan ...... igo

XI. Runes and Ogams 201

Index 205

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

Indian Petition to United States Congress. Front is/icce

1. Magical I'ictograph against Stings . . . • I?

2. Magical Device against Skin Disease . . • 19

3. Aboriginal Rock Carvings (Australia) . . .25
3a. Aboriginal Rock Paintings (Australia) . . .26

4. Bushman Paintings . 28

4a. Bushman Paintings ....... 29

4b. Specimen of Bushmen Rock Sculptures . . -30
4c. Engravings found on Rocks in Algeria . . .31

5. Bushman Rain-Charm ...... 32

6. Semang Rain-Charm ....... 33

6a. Record of Expedition ...... 33

6b. Various Types of the Human Form . . .33

7. Quipu, for Reckoning, etc. ..... 37

8. Double Calumet Wampum ..... 44

9. Double Calumet Council Hearth . . . .44

10. Jesuit Missionary Wampum . . . . -45

11. Four Nations' Alliance Wampum . . . .45
iia. Penn Wampum ....... 46

12. 13. Indian Grave-posts . . . . , .48

14. Tomb-board of Indian Chief . . . . .49

15. Hunter's Grave-post ....... 50

16. A Cadger's Map of a Begging District . . .52

17. Ojibwa Love-letter 53

18. Love-song 53

19. Mnemonic Song of an Ojibwa Medicine-man , . 54

20. Wabeno destroying an Enemy . . . . • 56

21. Etching on Innuit Drill-bow . . . . -57

22. Ojibwa hunting Record ...... 57

23. Hidatsa Pictograph on a Buffalo Shoulder-blade . 58

24. Alaskan Hunting Record ...... 59

25. Record of Starving Hunter . . . . .59

26. Alaskan Hunting Life ...... 60

27. Indian Expedition ....... 61

28. Biography of Indian Chief ...... 61

29. War-song ......... 62

30. Letter offering Treaty of Peace . . . . .63

31. Census Roll of an Indian Band . . . . .65

32. Record of Departure (Innuit) . . . . .66

33. Statue from Palenque ...... 70

THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

Man

49-
50.

51-
52.

PIGURR

34. Itzcoatl

35. Rebus of Itzcoatl

36. Paternoster Rebus .....

37. Chinese Picture-writing and Later Uncial

38. Chinese and Tibetan Triglot .

39. Rock Inscription at Behistun .

40. Cylinder Seal of Sargon I. . . .

41. Tell-el-Amarna Tablet ....

42. First Creation Tablet ....

43. 44. Deluge Tablet (Chaldean Epic) .

45. Hieroglyphic, Hieratic, and Demotic Signs for

46. Comparative Ideographs ....

47. Ptolemy

48. Cleopatra .......

Kaisars (Csesar) — A. Takrtr (Autokrator) .
Facsimile of Hieratic Papyrus Prisse
Inscription on the Eshmunazar Sarcophagus
Inscription on Sacred Bowls (Baal Lebanon)

53. The Moabite Stone ....

54. Maneh Weight .....

55. Vase with Incised Characters (Crete)

56. Incised Characters on Cup (Crete) .

57. Characters on Vase (Crete)

58. Signs on Bronze Axe (Delphi) .

59. Signs on Blocks of Mycenaean Buildings (Kn6sos)

60. Symbols on Three-sided Cornelian (Crete)

61. Symbols on Four-sided Stone (Crete)

62. Symbols on Four-sided Stones, with Larger Face
(Central Crete) ......

Symbol on Single-faced Cornelian (Eastern Crete)
Symbol on Stone of Ordinary Mycenaean Type

(Athens)

Egyptian Scarabs, Xllth Dynasty — Early Cretan

Seal-stones .....

66. Signs on Potsherds at Tell-el-Hesy compared with

/Egean Forms ....

67. Hittite Inscription at Hamah .

68. Signs on Vase-handle (Mycenae)

69. Signs on Amphora-handle (Mycenae)

Acknowledgments are gratefully tendered to Messrs. Macmillan,
Messrs. Longmans, Mr. John Murray, Messrs. Eyre & Spottiswoode, Mr.
Edward Arnold, Messrs. Witherby, the Cambridge University Press, and
the Anthropological Institute for permission to reproduce illustrations
from their several Dublications.

63-
64.

65-

PAGB

73
73
74
76
80
86
97
99
100

lOI

105
no

119
119
119
127
128
132

134
136
146
146

147
147
148

149
149

150
150

150

161

162
164

166

-to— » a^o

THE STORY OF
THE ALPHABET

EDWARD CLODD

AUTHOR OF THE STORY OF PRIMITIVE MAN,

PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION, THE STORY

OF CREATION, ETC.

"The two greatest inventions cf the human mind
are writing and money — the commoii language of intel-
ligence, and the common langupgc of self-interest."
— Marquis de Mikabeau

WITH NINETY ILLUSTRATIONS

NEW YORK
MCMXIII

Prititi-il in tin- I'liitcd Statps of America

THE
STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

CHAPTER I.

INT RODUC TORY.

"What is ever seen is never seen," and it may
be questioned if one in ten thousand of the read-
ers of to-day ever pauses to ask what is the his-
tory of the conventional signs called the Alpha-
bet, which, in their varying changes of position,
make up the symbols of the hundred thousand
words and more contained in a comprehensive
dictionary of the English tongue.

Professor Max Muller says that "by putting
together twenty-three or twenty-four letters in
every possible variety we might produce every
word that has ever been used in any language of
the world. The number of these words, taking
twenty-three letters as the basis, would be 25,852,-
016,738,884,976,640,000, or, if we took twenty-four,
would be 620,448,401,733,239,439,360,000 ; but," as
the Professor warns us, in words the force of which
will be manifest later on, "even these trillions,
billions, and millions of sounds would not be
words, because they would lack the most impor-
tant ingredient — that which makes a word to be a
word — namely, the different ideas by which they
were called into life, and which are expressed dif-

lO THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

ferently in different languages." (^Lectures on Lan-
guage, ii. 8i.)

These words themselves, as will also be shown
concerning the ear-pictures by which they are rep-
resented, reveal in their analysis a story of the
deepest interest. In the happy simile quoted by
the late Archbishop Trench in his Study of Words^
they are " fossil history," and, as he adds, " fossil
poetry and fossil ethics " also. To cite a few
examples, more or less apposite to our subject,
" book " is probably from the Anglo-Saxon kk, a
" beech," tablets of the bark of that tree being
one of the substances on which written characters
were inscribed. Parallel to this are the words
" library " and " libel," both derived from the
Latin liber, the inner bark or rind of a tree used
for paper ; while, as everybody knows, the word
" paper " preserves the history of the manufacture
of writing material in Egypt from the pith of the
papyrus reed, the use of which goes back, as will
be shown hereafter, to a high antiquity, and the
classic name of which, biblos, has been applied to
" bible." " Code " is derived from the Latin codex,
"a tree-trunk"; "letters" comes through the
French /ettre from the Latin lino, lition, " to daub "
or " besmear," an early mode of writing being the
graving of characters on tablets smeared with
wax. "Tablet" is the diminutive of "table,"
which comes from the Latin tabula, " a board,"
and the ancient writing instrument, called a stylus,
illustrates the passage of language from the con-
crete to the abstract in its application to the way
in which a writer expresses his ideas. We speak
of his "style," just as we say "he wields an able
pen," this word being derived from the Latin
penna, " a feather." The phrase lapsus calami, " a

INTRODUCTORY. 1 1

slip of the pen," preserves record of the use of
the reed (Latin calamus), which also survives in
"quill," from Old English quylle, "a reed." But
the metal pen has a longer history than was sus-
pected, since Dr. Waldstein has found one, cut
and slit like our modern specimens, in a tomb of
the third century b. c, at Eretria in the island of
Euboea in the yEgean. "Volume," from Latin
volutiien, "a roll," tells us what was the usual form
of books in ancient times, the old form of preser-
vation and custody of legal records surviving in
"Rolls of Court," "Master of the Rolls," and so
forth. So in "diploma," which, literally, is a
paper folded double, from Greek diploo, " to fold."
Both " diplomacy " and " duplicity " mean " doub-
ling," but the force of the parallel may not be
pursued here. Finally — for the list might be ex-
tended indefinitely — " parchment " is borrowed
from Pergamus, a town in Asia Minor, where skin
came into general use, Ptolemy V. (205-1S5 b. c),
so runs a doubtful story told by Plmy, having
prohibited the export of papyrus from Egypt.

As words, under the analyses now indicated,
yield the history of their origin and of the changes
both in spelling and meaning which follow their
passage from older forms, and likewise reveal the
reasons which governed the choice of them, so
the letters of which they are made up bear witness
to similar laws of development. The story which
it is the purpose of this little book to endeavour
to extract from them has mutilated and imperfect
chapters, and, moreover, missing chapters which
may never be recovered. But sufficing material
survives for piecing together a narrative of the
triumph of the human mind over one of the most
difficult tasks to which it could apply itself ; a task

12 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

which, unwrought, would have made advance in
the highest sense impossible beyond a certain
point. In the highest sense, because man has
gone a long way without knowledge either of
reading or wTiting. These "two R's " are not
necessary in matters of personal contact with his
fellows, while in other ways progress is independ-
ent of them. An illiterate man may be an accom-
plished landscape artist, a skilful engineer, a suc-
cessful farmer or trader, and prosperous in many
ways where the aim of life is to " live by bread
alone." It is true that much of the intellectual
and spiritual record of man's past was long pre-
served in the form of oral tradition. But to the
volume of such record there is a limit, while time
and caprice alike work havoc in it. Memory,
great as was its capacity of old, before depend-
ence on books impaired it, was not infallible, nor,
as the world's stock of knowledge increased, could
it "pull down its barns and build greater wherein
to bestow its goods." We have, by an effort of
the imagination well-nigh impossible to make,
only to assume the absence of any means of mate-
rial record of the involved and myriad events
which fill the world's past, to conceive the intel-
lectual poverty of the present. We have only to
assume the absence of any medium whereby we
could communicate with friends at a distance, or
whereby the now complex and countless dealings
between man and man could be set down and
every transaction thus "brought to book," to
realise the hopeless tangle of our social life. All
that memory failed to overlap would be an abso-
lute blank ; the dateless and otherwise uninscribed
monuments which the past had left behind would
but deepen the darkness ; all knowledge of the

INTRODUCTORY. 1 3

Strivings and speculations of men of old would
have been unattainable; all observation and ex-
perience through which science has advanced from
guesses to certainties irretrievably lost ; life could
have been lived only from "hand to mouth," and
the spectacle presented of an arrested world of
sentient beings. Save in fragmentary echoes re-
peated by fugitive bards, the great epics of East
and West would have perished, and the immortal
literatures of successive ages never have e.xisted.
The invention of writing alone made possible the
passage from barbarism to civilisation, and secured
the continuous progress of the human race. It is
solely through the marvellous perfecting, through
stages of slow advance, of a scripture that " can-
not be broken," that the past is as eloquent, as
real, as the present. " The pen is mightier than
the sword " in accumulating and preserving for
both gentle and simple the store of the world's in-
tellectual wealth, unto which "all the things that
can be desired are not to be compared."

These reflections are commonplace enough,
but they may not be wholly needless, and an ex-
ample or two of the impression made on the bar-
baric mind by written symbols may help us the
better to appreciate what our case would be with-
out them. In the narrative of his adventures in
the Tonga Islands, published about ninety years
ago, William Mariner tells how anxiety to escape
from the place where, on the wreck of the ship
Port au Prince, he and some other Englishmen
had been cast ashore, led him to write, by means
of a solution of gunpowder and a little mucilage
for ink, a letter which he entrusted to a friendly
native to give to the captain of any vessel that
might happen to touch at Tonga. Finow, the

14 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

king, came to hear of this, and got hold of the
letter. But he could make " neither head nor
tail " of it. However, by threats of death if lie
refused, one of Mariner's shipmates was made to
interpret the mystic signs to Finow, who, still
puzzled, sent for Mariner and ordered him to
write down something else, saying, when Mariner
asked for a subject, " Put down me." This done,
Finow sent for another sailor, who read the royal
name aloud, whereupon the king appeared more
bewildered than ever, exclaiming, "This not like
me ; where are my legs ? " Then it slowly dawned
upon him that it was possible to make signs of
things which both the writer and the interpreter
had seen. But the bewilderment returned when
Mariner told him that he could write down a
description of any one whom he had never seen,
or of an event which happened long ago or far
away, when these were told him. Thereupon
Finow whispered to him the name of Tongoo Aho,
a former king of Tonga, who, it had come to
Mariner's knowledge, was blind in one eye. When
Mariner set these things down, and the king had
them read to him, it was explained that " in sev-
eral parts of the w^orld messages were sent to
great distances through the same medium, and,
being folded and fastened up, the bearer could
know nothing of the contents ; and that the his-
tories of whole nations were thus handed down to
posterity without spoiling by being kept. Finow
acknowledged this to be a most notable invention,
but added that it would not at all do for the Tonga
Islands; that there would be nothing but dis-
turbances and conspiracies, and he should not
be sure of his life perhaps another month. He
said, however, jocularly, that he should like to

INTRODUCTORY. 15

know it himself, and for all the women to know
it, that he might make love with less risk of
discovery, and not so much chance of incurring
the vengeance of their husbands." (Mariner's
Tonga Islands, \. 116, ed. 1827.) The Smith-
sonian Reports, 1864, tell a story of an Indian
who was sent by a missionary to a colleague
with four loaves of bread, accompanied by a
letter stating their number. The Indian ate one
of the loaves, and was, of course, found out. He
was sent on a similar errand and repeated the
theft, but took the precaution to hide the letter
under a stone while he was eating the bread, so
that it might not see him !

Barbaric ideas fall into fundamentally-related
groups, and the examples just given are connected
with the wide-spread belief in the efficacy of writ-
ten characters to work black or white magic, to
effect cures, and otherwise act as charms — a belief
largely derived from the legends which ascribe the
origin of writing to the gods — legends themselves
the product of Ignorance, the mother of Mystery.
In an Assyrian inscription, Sardanapalus V. speaks
of the cuneiform or wedge-shaped characters as a
revelation to his royal ancestors from the god
Nebo ; among the Egyptians, Thoth was the
scribe of the gods, and their oldest forms of writ-
ing were named "the divine." Chinese tradition
ascribes the invention of writing to the dragon-
faced, four-eyed sage Ts'ang Chien, who saw in
the stars of heaven, the footprints of birds, and
the marks on the back of the tortoise, the models
on which he formed the written characters. At
this invention " heaven caused showers of grain
to descend from on high; the disembodied spirits
wept in the darkness, and the dragons withdrew

l6 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

themselves from sight." On the altars raised to
Ts'ang Chien throughout the Celestial Land, every
scrap of fugitive paper which has writing on it is
burned in his honour. In Hindu legend, Brahma,
the supreme god of the Indian Trinity, gives
knowledge of letters to men ; and Nagari, in
which alphabet the sacred books are written, is
spoken of as " belonging to the city of the gods."
The handwriting of Brahma, legend further says,
is seen in the serrated sutures of men's skulls ; and
as Yahweh or Jehovah wrote the "Ten Words"
with his own finger, so Brahma inscribed the holy
texts of the Veda on leaves of gold. The story of
the culture-hero, Cadmus, introducing the alpha-
bet from Phoenicia into Greece is well known;
while in Irish legend, Ogmios, the Gaelish Hercu-
les, is familiar as the inventor of writing. But
perhaps less familiar is that in the Northern Saga
which attributes the invention of runes to
Odin :—

" Thought-runes shall thou deal with
If thou wilt be of all men
Fairest-souled, wight and wisest.
These areded,
These first cut,
These first took to heart high Hropt." (Odin.)

Belief in the power of the spoken word, nota-
bly as a curse, has world-wide illustration ; and
not less is that in the power of the written word
or of the pictorial symbol. Cabalistic formulae
and texts from sacred writings play a large part ;
the virtue in Jewish phylacteries and frontlets
was believed to depend on the texts which they
enclosed; the amulets worn by Abyssinians to
avert the evil eye and ward off demons have the
secret name of God chased on them ; passages

Fig. I. — Magical pictograph against stings.

1 8 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

from the Koran are enclosed in bags and hung
on Turkish and Arab horses to protect them
against Hke maleficence; prayers to the Madonna
are slipped into charm-cases to be worn by the
Neapolitans; while not so many years back (in-
deed, so persistent are superstitions, that kindred
practices obtain throughout Europe to this day)
sick folk in the Highlands were fanned with the
leaves of the Bible.

In his instructive and entertaining book on
Evolution in Art, Professor Haddon refers to a
series of valuable observations on the use of pic-
ture-writing as a charm against diseases and
stings of venomous animals, among the Semang
tribes of East Malacca, made by Mr. H. Vaughan
Stevens, and edited by Mr. A. Grunwedel. The
women wear bamboo combs on which are drawn
patterns of flowers or parts of flowers believed to
be antidotes to fevers and other invisible dis-
eases; for injuries and wounds such as those
caused by a falling bough in the jungle, or the
bite of a centipede, other means are employed.
Among the magic-working devices incised in
bamboo staves by the Semang magicians, Mr.
Vaughan Stevens gives illustrations of one against
the stings of scorpions and centipedes (fig. i),
and of another against a skin disease (fig. 2).

In the first-named there is depicted the figure
of an Argus pheasant, the wheel-like patterns
beneath which represent the eye-marks in the
tail-feathers. On the left is an orange-coloured
centipede, the head of which points to the tail of
the pheasant. The dotted lines round the centi-
pede are tracks which it leaves on a man's skin.
On the other side of the Argus are two blue scor-
pions, the figures at the end of their tails repre-

INTRODUCTORY

senting a swelling in
the flesh of the persons
stung by them. The
female of this kind of
scorpion is more poi-
sonous than the male,
and is said to cause
double stings, which
are denoted by the two
rows of dots in the top
figure. "The signifi-
cance of this bamboo
is that as the Argus
pheasant feeds on cen-
tipedes and scorpions,
so its help is invoked
against them by strik-
ing the bamboo against
the ground."

The other example,
which exhibits a much
more complicated and
conventionalised de-
vice, is designed as a
charm against two
kinds of skin disease,
the one represented by
fish scales indicating
leprous white ulcers,
the other represented
by oval figures indicat-
ing hard knots on and
under the skin. The
rows stand for the sev-
eral parts of the body
which are affected, and

-Magical device against
skin disease.

20 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

the figures increase in size to show that the disease
will spread if not cured. Although the way in
which the charm is applied is not clear, there is no
doubt that belief in its virtue belongs to the large
class of barbaric ideas grouped under sympa-
thetic magic, ;'. e. that things outwardly resembling
one another are thought by the barbaric or illiter-
ate to possess the same qualities. The result is
that effects are brought about in the individual
himself by the production of similar effects in
things belonging to him, or, what is more to the
purpose, in images or effigies of him. Here it
sufifices to say that the most familiar examples of
" sympathetic magic " are the making of an image
of the person whose destruction is sought, of wax,
clay, or other substance, so that as the wax is
melted, or the clay dissolved in running water,
his life may decline or wear away to its doom.
Such examples are gathered alike from civilised
and barbaric folk, from Devonshire and the High-
lands to North America and Borneo.

Things are invested with mystery in the degree
that their origins and causes are unknown; and
the beliefs and customs, of which a few among the
teeming illustrations have been given, invite the
reflection that, had writing remained the monop-
oly of any caste or class, it would have remained
an engine of enslavement, instead of becoming an
engine of liberation of the mind. "Knowledge is
power," and whatever has ensured the possession
and the retention of power over his fellows has
been seized upon by man — notably by man as
priest, from medicine-man to Pope, as wielder of
weapons of authority, the more dreaded when un-
seen or intangible. Signs which were unadapted,
and, things being what they then were, impossible,

THE BEGINNINGS OF THE ALPHABET. 2 1

for general use, and moreover needing great ex-
penditure of time and labour to master them,
would come under this head, and it was only
through their ultimate simplification that they
could become serviceable to the many, and made
vehicles of the diffusion of knowledge. How
monstrous and penal an mstrument of inequality
learning itself long continued among ourselves is
shown in the fact that " benefit of clergy " — one
among many evidences of the old conflict between
the civil and the sacerdotal powers — was not
wholly repealed until the year 1827. Under this
statute, exemption from trial for criminal offences
before secular courts was extended, by law passed
in the reign of Edward I., not only to ecclesiastics,
but to any man who could read. A prisoner sen-
tenced to death might be claimed by the bishop
of the diocese as a clerk and haled before him,
when the ordinary gave the man a Latin book
from which to read a verse or two. If the ordi-
nary said " Legit ut clericus " — /. e. " he reads like
a clerk " — the offender was only burnt in the hand,
and then set free.

CHAPTER n.

THE BEGINNINGS OF THE ALPHABET.

We may, without further preface, advance to
our main purpose, which is to supply an account
of the stages through which the alphabets of the
civilised world passed before they reached their,
practically, final form. Here, as in aught else
that the wit of man has devised and the cunning

2 2 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

of his hand applied, the law of development is
seen at work. In the quest for traces of any
fundamental differences between him and the
animals to which he stands in nearest physical
and psychical relation, he has been variously de-
scribed as tool-maker, fire-maker, possessor of
articulate speech, and so forth; but the further
that observation and comparison have been made,
the more apparent has it become that those differ-
ences are of degree and not of kind. Some evi-
dence in support of this has been already summa-
rised in previous volumes of this series; and here
it suffices to say that it is in the inventive arts, as
e.g. the production of fire, of the mode of which
nature supplied the hints, and the making of pic-
torial signs, in which the mimetic instinct, shared
by some of the lower animals, comes into play,
that, restricting the comparison to things material,
man appears upon a higher plane. But this has
been reached by processes of development involv-
ing no break in the continuity of things.

In this "story" we start with man as sign-
maker. His prehistoric remains supply evidence
of artistic capacity in a remote past, and set be-
fore us in vigorous, rapid outline what his life and
surroundings must have been. On fragments of
bone, horn, schist, and other materials, the savage
hunter of the Reindeer Period, using a pointed
flint flake, depicted alike himself and the wild ani-
mals which he pursued. From cavern-floors of
France, Belgium, and other parts of Western
Europe, whose deposits date from the Old Stone
Age, there have been unearthed rude etchings of
naked, hardy men brandishing spears at wild
horses, or creeping along the ground to hurl their
weapons at the urus, or wild ox, or at the woolly-

THE BEGINNINGS OF THE ALPHABET. 23

haired elephant. A portrait of this last named,
showing the creature's shaggy ears, long hair, and
upwardly curved tusks, its feet being hidden in
the surrounding high grass, is one of the most
famous examples of palasolithic art.

Here let us pause to say that the apparent
absence of other indications of man's presence,
showing passage from lower to higher stages of
culture, led to the assumption that vast gaps have
occurred in his occupancy of north-western and
other parts of Europe. The theory of absolute
disconnection between the Old Stone Age and the
Newer Stone Age long held the field, but it has
disappeared before the evidence against tenant-
less intervals of areas in prehistoric times. And
so with succeeding periods. There is no warrant
for assuming entire effacement of one race, with
resulting clear field for the immigration of an-
other race; and modern archaeological research is
producing the links which connect the rude art of
Northern with that of Southern Europe, and, what
will be shown to be of great moment, with that
of the Eastern Mediterranean. The examples of
this must remain rare, since only pictographs on
some durable material, or specimens of the fictile
art, would survive the action of time. But, hap-
pily, if they are infrequent, they are widely dis-
tributed. For to those yielded by the bone-
caverns already referred to are to be added rock-
carvings in Denmark, and figures on limestone
cliffs of the Maritime Alps; there are curious
graphic signs, suggestive to some eyes of a primi-
tive script, in the Marz d'Azil cave; while still
more interesting are the animal and fylfot or
swastika-like figures (the swastika is a solar sym-
bol) "painted probably by early Slavonic hands

24 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

on the face of a rock overhanging a sacred grotto
in a fiord of the Bocche di Cattaro." To this last-
named example, given by Mr. Arthur Evans in his
paper on " Primitive Pictographs " {Jour?ial of
Hellenic Studies, xiv. ii. 1894) may be added some
pregnant remarks by the same authority. "When
we recall the spontaneous artistic qualities of the
ancient race which has left its records in the carv-
ings on bone and ivory in the caves of the 'Rein-
deer Period,' this evidence of at least partial
continuity on the northern shores of the Mediter-
ranean suggests speculations of the deepest inter-
est. Overlaid with new elements, swamped in the
dull, though materially higher, Neolithic civilisa-
tion, may not the old aesthetic faculties which
made Europe the earliest-known home of anything
that can be called human art, as opposed to mere
tools and mechanical contrivances, have finally
emancipated themselves once more in the South-
ern regions, where the old stock most survived ?
In the extraordinary manifestations of artistic
genius to which, at widely remote periods and un-
der the most diverse political conditions, the later
populations of Greece and Italy have given birth,
may we not be allowed to trace the re-emergence,
as it were, after long underground meanderings,
of streams whose upper waters had seen the day-
light of that earlier world ? " (Presidential Ad-
dress to the Anthropological Section, British Asso-
ciation, Nature, ist Oct. 1896.)

But man at the same stage of culture being
everywhere practically the same, there is, in the
paucity of examples from the Europe of the past,
compensation in the specimens of graphic art
found among extant barbaric folk. It is prob-
able that a good proportion of these lack signifi-

THE BEGINNINGS OF THE ALPHABET.

cance, but the pictograph is the parent of the alphabet,
and therefore the careful transcripts of rock and
other paintings which explorers have made may

Fig. 3. — Aboriginal rock-carvings (Australia).

yet prove to be of value when interpreted in the
light of examples whose gradations have been
traced. Since the extinction of the Tasmanians,
whom anthropologists regard as the nearest ap-
proach to Palaeolithic man, the Australians stand,
in certain respects, at the bottom of the scale, al-
though the ingenuity of their social organisations
warrants hesitation in making them the nadir of
human kind. But as the reproductions show (Figs.
3 and 3a), their attempts at art are inferior to the
spirited designs of the prehistoric cave-dwellers.

THE BEGINNINGS OF THE ALPHABET. 27

Mr. R. H. Mathews, who has made an exten-
sive survey of the rock-pahitings and carvings,
says that one type serves for another, so lacking
are all in variety ; "the stencilled and impressed
hands, the outlines of men and animals rudely
depicted in various colours, appearing to be
universally distributed over the continent." He
adds that " although it will be better not to
attempt to suggest meanings to the groups of
native drawings until a very much larger amount
of information has been brought together . . .
still when we know that drawings such as these
by uncivilised nations of all times, in various
parts of the world, have ultimately been found
to be full of meaning, it is not unreasonable for
us to expect that the strange figures painted and
carved upon rocks all over Australia will some
day be interpreted. Perhaps some of these pic-
tures are ideographic expressions of events in the
history of the tribe; certain groupings of figures
may portray some legend ; many of the animals
probably represent totems ; and it is likely that
a number of them were executed for pastime and
amusement." {^Journal of the Anthropological In-
stitute, XXV. 2, p. 153.) In their recently pub-
lished " Native Tribes of Central Australia,"
Messrs. Spencer and Gillen divide the rock-paint-
ings into two series, those of ordinary type, and
those which, found in places strictly taboo to
women and children and uninitiated men, are
associated with totems, i.e. with the natural object,
whether living or non-living, from w^hich the tribe
believes itself to be descended. These totemistic
figures, called Chiiringa (a general native term
for sacred objects) Ilkinia, are frequently in the
form of spiral and concentric circles, others being

THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

portraits of the totems themselves, as low in
type as the centipede or witchetty grub.

Fig. 4. — Bushman paintings.

The faces of sandstone caverns in South
Africa are often covered with paintings which
are the handiwork of Bushmen (Figs. 4, 4a, and
4^). With a skill showing some advance on the

THE BEGINNINGS OF THE ALPHABET.

art of the Australian aborigines there is depicted,
usually in black or brownish-red colour, the hunt-
ing and other exploits which make up life among
a people who represent the aboriginal races of
the southern portion of the continent. Some of

\^y((.-l^y mm

Fig. 4a. — Bushman paintings.

the drawings border on caricature ; others, in the
words of an observer, " suggest actual portraiture.
The ornamentation of the head-dresses, feathers,

3°

THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

beads, tassels, &c., seemed to have claimed much
care, while the higher classes of drawings indicate

correct apprecia-
tion of the actual
appearance of ob-
jects, and per-
spective and fore-
shortening are
well rendered."
(Mark Hutchin-
son, Jounial of
the Anthropological
Institute, xiv. p.
464.)

These proba- .
bly now degraded
folk, who live on
lizards, locusts,
and roots when
other food fails,
have a good store
of legend and
folk-lore. Fig. 5
seems to portray

Fig.

4^. — Specimen of Bushman rock
sculptures.

their belief in " sympathetic magic," if, as conjec-
tured, it represents the dragging of an hippopota-
mus or other amphibious animal across the land
for the purpose of producing rain. The Semangs
of the Malay Peninsula use a bamboo rain-charm
(Fig. 6), on which the wind-driven showers are de-
picted in oblique lines, and, among many other ex-
amples wherein the higher and lower culture meet
together, there is one supplied by old Rome,
where it was the custom to throw images of the
corn-spirit into the Tiber so that the crops might
be drenched with rain. As showing the persist-

THE BEGINNINGS OF THE ALPHABET.

ency of superstitions, here is a paragraph anent
the severe drought in Russia in 1899: "In an-
other village of the district of Bugulma some
moujiks opened the grave of a peasant who had
lately been buried, and then poured water over
the corpse, in the belief that this was the best
method of bringing
rai n . ' ' — Daily Chronicle,
24th August 1899. The
New World is rich in
ancient monuments
often adorned with
symbolic devices, but
older than these are
the pictographs cover-
ing erratic blocks and
cliff escarpments from
Guiana to Nova Scotia,
and westward to the
Rockies. Some are in-
cised in the hard stone
to a depth of half an
inch ; others are traced
in broad lines of red
ochre or other colour,
their weather - worn
state witnessing to a
high antiquity. Their
purpose is often not
easy to explain, but we
know that therein lie
the germs whence al-
phabets sprung. One picture (Fig. da) on the
face of a rock on the shore of Lake Superior,
copied and interpreted by Schoolcraft, records an
expedition across the lake, led by Myeengun, or
3

Fig. 4r. — Engravings found on
rocks in Algeria (compare
with Bushman type).

THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

Fig. 5. — Bushman rain-charm.

" Wolf," a noted In-
dian chief. The
crew of each canoe
is denoted by a
series of upright
strokes, Myeen-
gun's chief ally,
Kishkemanusee, the
"Kingfisher," being
in the first canoe.
The arch with three
circles (three suns
under heaven)shows
that the voyage
took three days.
The tortoise (a fre-
quent symbol of
" land " in North
American picture-
writing) seems to
indicate the arrival
of the expedition,
while the picture of
the mounted chief
evidences that the
event took place
after the introduc-
tion of horses into
Canada. Some of
the examples, less
easy to explain, rep-
resent the migra-
tion of tribes ; some,
like the sculptured
eagle near the bor-
ders of Quauhua-

THE BEGINNINGS OF THE ALPHABET. 33

Fig. 6. — Semang rain-charm.

huac (" the place near the eagle ") are symbolic
boundary - marks ; while others are direction -

Fig. 6a. — Record of expedition.

marks. Some have life-size human figures, rayed
or horned ; one engraved on a rock overloolcing
the Big Harpeth, in Tennessee, depicts a sun vis-

Fig. 6b. — Various types of the human form.

34 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET,

ible four miles off. Doubtless a large number of
this class (Fig. 6b) are merely the outcome of that
rude artistic fancy of man which, as has been
seen, has had continuous expression from prehis-
toric times.

CHAPTER III.

MEMORY-AIDS AND PICTURE-WRITING.

The printed letters or sound-signs which com-
pose our alphabet are about two thousand five
hundred years old. " Roman type " we call them,
and rightly so, since from Italy they came. They
vary only in slight degree from the founts of the
famous printers of the fifteenth century, these be-
ing imitations of the beautiful " minuscule " (so
called as being of smaller size) manuscripts of
four hundred years earlier. Minuscule letters are
cursive (i.e. running) forms of the curved letters
about an inch long called " uncials " (from Latin
uncia, " an inch," or from tinctis, " crooked "), which
were themselves derived from the Roman letters
of the Augustan age. These Roman capitals, to
which those in modern use among us correspond,
"are practically identical with the letters em-
ployed at Rome in the third century b.c. ; such,
for instance, as are seen in the well-known in-
scriptions on the tombs of the Scipios, now among
the treasures of the Vatican. These, again, do
not differ very materially from forms used in the
earliest existing specimens of Latin writing, which
may probably be referred to the end of the fifth
century B.C. Thus it appears that our English
alphabet is a member of that great Latin family

MEMORV-AiriS AND PICTURE-WRITING. 35

of alpliabets, whose geographical extension was
originally conterminous, or nearly so, with the
limits of the Western Empire, and afterwards with
the ancient obedience to the Roman See." (Canon
Isaac Taylor's History of the Alphabet, vol. i.

P 7I-)

The age of our own alphabet being thus indi-
cated, we may postpone further remark on its
lineal descent, and pass to inquiry into the primi-
tive forms of which all alphabets are the abbre-
viated descendants, and also to reference to some
primitive methods for which they are substitutes.

A survey of the long period which this devel-
opment covers shows fpur well-marked stages,
although in these, as in aught else appertaining
to man's history, there are no true lines of divi-
sion. The making of these, like the apparent
lines of longitude and latitude of the cartographer,
is justified by their convenience. These stages
are : —

{a) The Mnemonic, or memory-aiding, when
some tangible object is used as a message, or for
record, between people at a distance, and also for
the purpose of accrediting the messenger. As
will be seen, it borders on the symbolie j indeed, it
anticipates that stage.

{b) The Pictorial, in w'hich a picture of the
thing is given, whereby at a glance it tells its own
story.

{c) The Ideographic, in which the picture
becomes representative, i.e. is converted into a
symbol.

{d) The Phonetic, in which the picture be-
comes a phonogram, or sound-representing sign.
The phonogram may be — (i) verbal^ i. e. a sound-
sign for a whole word ; (2) syllabic^ i.e. a sound-

36 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

sign for syllables; or (3) alphabetic, a sound-sign
for each letter.

To recapitulate stages (/>), (r), and (</) : —

In stage {p) the sign as eye-picture suggests
the thing ;

In stage (f) the sign as eye-picture suggests
the name ;

In stage {d) the sign as eye-picture suggests
the sound ;
and it is in the passage from [c] to {d), whereby
constant signs are chosen to stand for constant
sounds, that the progress of the human race was
assured, because only thereby was the preserva-
tion of all that is of abiding value made possible.

{a) The Mnemonic Stage. — This is well repre-
sented by "quipus" or knotted cords, and by
wampums or shell-ornamented belts. The quipu
(Fig. 7) has a long history, and is with us both in
the rosary on which the Roman Catholic counts
his prayers, in the knot which we tie in our hand-
kerchief to help a weak memory, and in the sailor's
log-line. Herodotus tells us that when Darius
bade the lonians remain to guard the floating
bridge which spanned the Ister, he " tied sixty
knots in a thong, saying: 'Men of Ionia ... do
ye keep this thong and do as I shall say: — so
soon as ye shall have seen me go forward against
the Scythians, from that time begin and untie a
knot on each day ; and if within this time I am not
here, and ye find that the days marked by the
knots have passed by, then sail away to your own
lands ' " (iv. 98). And the same obviously handy
device is of widespread use, reaching its more
elaborate form among the ancient Peruvians, from
whose language the term "quipu," meaning
" knot," is borrowed. It consists of a main cord,

MEMORY-AIDS AND PICTURE-WRITING.

to which are fastened at given distances thinner
cords of different colours, each cord being knotted
in divers ways for special purposes, and each

colour having its
own significance.
Red strands

stood for sol-
diers, yellow for
gold, white for
silver, green for
corn, and so
forth, while a sin-
gle knot meant
ten, two single
knots meant

twenty, double
knots one hun-
dred, and two
double knots two
hundred. Such
simple devices
served manifold
purposes. Be-
sides their con-
venience in reck-
oning, they were
used for keeping
the annals of the
empire of the In-
cas ; for trans-
mitting orders to

Fig. 7. — Quipu, for reckoning, &c.

38 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

outlying provinces; for registering details of the
army; and even for preserving records of the
dead, with whom the quipu was buried, as in old
Egypt the biography or titles of the deceased were
set forth in hieroglyph and deposited in the tomb.
Quoting from Von Tschudi's Peru, Dr. E. B. Ty-
lor says that each town had its officer whose spe-
cial function was to tie and interpret the quipus.
They were called Quipucamayocuna, or knot-offi-
cers; but although they attained great facility in
their work, they were seldom able to read a quipu
without the aid of an oral commentary. \Vhen
one came from a distant province, it was neces-
sary to give notice with it whether it referred to
census, tribute, war, and so forth. But by con-
stant practice they so far perfected the system as
to be able to register with their knots the most
important events of the kingdom, and to set
down its laws and ordinances. Although vain
attempts to read the quipus have been made
in the present day. Dr. Tylor adds that there are
still Indians in Southern Peru "who are perfectly
familiar w'ith the contents of certain historical
quipus preserved from ancient times; but they
keep their knowledge a profound secret, espe-
cially from the white men." {Early History of
Mankind, p. i6o.) This knot-reckoning is in use
among the Puna herdsmen of the Peruvian pla-
teau.x. On the first strand of the quipu they regis-
ter the bulls, on the second the cows, these again
they divide into milch cows and those that are
dry ; the ne.xt strands register the calves, the ne.xt
the sheep, and so forth, while other strands record
the produce; the different colours of the cords
and the twisting of the knots giving the key to
the several purposes. Akin to this is the practice

MEMORY-AIDS AND PICTURE-WRITING. 39

among the Faloni Indians of California, concern-
ing whom Dr. Hoffman reports that each year a
certain number are chosen to visit the settlement
at San Gabriel to sell native blankets. "Every
Indian sending goods provided the salesman with
two cords made of twisted hair or wool, on one
of which was tied a knot for every real received,
and on the other a knot for each blanket sold.
When the sum reached ten reals^ or one dollar, a
double knot was made. Upon the return of the
salesman, each person selected from the lot his
own goods, by which he would at once perceive
the amount due, and also the number of blankets
for which the salesman was responsible." The
natives of Ardrah, in West Africa, use small cords,
each knot in which has a meaning ; and among
the Jebus, the objects knotted into strings tell
their separate tale, cowrie shells placed face to
face denoting friendship ; an arrow, war ; and so
forth. Other tribes have devised message-sticks
somewhat after the well-known native Australian
type. More highly-developed knot-reckoning is
found among the Mexican Zuni, and in more
primitive form among some North American In-
dians; but, not tarrymg to detail these, we cross
the Pacific, noting, on our passage, that a genera-
tion ago the Hawaian tax-gatherers kept accounts
of the assessable property throughout the island
on lines of cordage from four to five hundred
fathoms long. Knots, loops, and tufts of differ-
ent shape, size, and colour indicated the several
districts, and the amount of tax to be paid by
each inhabitant was defined by marks of the same
character as those now specified, with such variety
as to prevent confusion. The Shi'i-King, a sacred
historical book of the Chinese, records the use of

40 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

knotted cords prior to the invention of writing.
The number and distances of the knots served
as conventional mnemonics, and also as imperial
records, until written characters replaced them.
Legend refers the tying of knots in strings to
about 2800 B.C., when Fo-hi invented eight sym-
bols, and at the same time pictorial representa-
tions of these knotted strings were taken to in-
dicate the object thereby symbolised. These
Morse - like symbols are : —

Another Chinese leg-
Heaven . :::^^::^^^^:z=. end says that *' the most
Balance . ^^^Eii^^^E ancient forms were five
Water . . _ hundred and forty char-
Earthqu'ake 1 meters, formed by a

ZZZZZZZ^^ combination of knotted
° ■ ■ - strings and the eight

Sacrifice . -__-- — ^:::^z:zz symbols, made in the
Boundary . - form of birds' claws in

Earth . . zz:^iir ^^^^ various states of ten-
sion, and that all these

{C.Ga.Tdner, jc^urna/ Ly/tno/og- ^ hundred and fortv

characters were sue-

ical Society, 1870, vol. ii. p. 5.)

gested to the inventor by the marks (left by the
claws) upon the sand." The use of looped or
knotted cords is depicted in Egyptian hieroglyph,
and among other tribes of the African continent
the Jebus of to-day evidence the survival of this
primitive mevioria tec/mica, while from Melanesia
to Formosa the knotted cord, as in Australia and
Africa the message-stick, render service as means
of communication between man and his fellows.
The nine incisions, with a longer cut across them
to denote ten, is a mode of decimal reckoning and
of record found alike among Red Indians and Lon-
don bargees. The same purpose e.xplains the cus-

MEMORY-AIDS AND PICTURE-WRITING. 41

toni, in force well within the present century, of
our Exchequer in keeping certain accounts by
means of notched tallies. The tally was a squared
stick of well-seasoned hazel or willow, in one side
of which notches of different breadth, indicating
pounds, shillings, and pence, were cut to mark the
amount of money lent by any person to the Gov-
ernment, the same amount being cut in Roman
numerals, together w-ith the lender's name and
date of the loan, on the two opposite sides. The
stick was then split down the middle, and one half
handed to the lender, the other half being kept in
the Exchequer. When the money fell due, the
lender surrendered his half for comparison with
its fellow, and the two being found to " tally," the
loan was repaid. It was through the overheating
of stoves in the burning of heaps of accumulated
tally-sticks that the Houses of Parliament were
destroyed in 1834. Fifty years ago in Scotland
(and the like may happen in out-of-the-way ham-
lets to-day), the baker's boy took a "nick-stick "
with his bread, and made a notch in the stick for
every loaf he left on his rounds. So it was, Dr.
Hoffman tells us, with the Pennsylvania dairy-
man, who kept account of the milk which he sold
by marking notches for pints and quarts on a
stick. As these notches correspond to entries of
transactions in our daybooks and ledgers, so the
once widely-used Clog Almanack corresponded to
our modern IVhitaker. It consisted of a square-
shaped "clog" or "block " of wood (sometimes
of metal), and was designed chiefly to show when
the Sundays and holidays fell, certain symbols or
hieroglyphs being drawn against saint and other
festal days — as, for example, an axe for Saint
Paul, a true-lovers' knot for Saint Valentine, and

42 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

a harp for Saint David. With this may be com-
pared the hieroglyphic wheels named " record of
the gods," formerly in use for recording time
among the Indians of Virginia. " These wheels
had sixty spokes, each for a year, as if to mark
the ordinary age of man, and they were painted
on skins kept by the priests. They marked on
each spoke or division a hieroglyphic figure to
show the memorable events of the year." (Tylor,

P- 93-)

Wampum-belts are of much narrower geo-
graphical distribution than quipus. They consist
of hand-made beads or perforated shells arranged
in various more or less conventionalised patterns
on bark filaments, hemp, or deerskin strips or
sinews, the ends of the belts being selvedged by
sinews or hempen fibres. The patterns are pic-
torial symbols recording events in the history of
the tribe or treaties between tribes ; the belts be-
ing also used to note land boundaries or personal
property, sometimes even passing, in the old days,
as shell-money in all parts of New England from
one end of the coast to the other. As illustrating
a common purpose for which the wampum record
was used, Peter Clarke tells us, in his Origin and
Traditional History of the Wyandotts (a tribe of the
Huron-Iroquois stock), that " in the last decade
of the eighteenth century, the king or head chief,
Sut-staw-ra-tse, called a meeting at the house of
Chief Adam Brown, who had charge of the archives,
which consisted of wampum belts, parchments, &c.,
contained in a large trunk. One by one they were
brought out and shown to the assembled chiefs
and warriors. Chief Brown wrote on a piece of
paper and tacked it to each wampum belt, desig-
nating the compact or treaty it represented, after

MEMORY-AIDS AND PICTURE-WRITING. 43

it had been explained from memory by the chiefs
appointed for that purpose. There sat before
them the venerable king, in whose head were
stored the hidden contents of each wampum belt,
listening to the rehearsal, and occasionally cor-
recting the speaker and putting him on the right
track whenever he deviated." Clarke goes on to
say that "when the majority of the people re-
moved to the south-west, they demanded to have
the belts, as these might be a safeguard to them.
Some of these belts recorded treaties of alliance
or of peace with other tribes which were now
residing in that region, and it might be of great
importance to the Wyandotts to be able to pro-
duce and refer to them. The justice of this claim
was admitted, and they were allowed to have the
greater part of their belts." And modern inquirers
tell us that, in so far as the wampums still possess
utility, it is as evidence of a subsisting treaty or a
title-deed. Few examples, however, of the vast
number of belts once in the possession of the North
American tribes (and these almost exclusively con-
fined to the Iroquois country) survive, since in the
displacement of the red man by the white their
value from the land-right point of view has disap-
peared. Four interestmg specimens, known as the
" Hale Series of Huron Wampum Belts," which
were presented by Dr. Tylor to the Pitt-Rivers
Museum at Oxford in 1897, form the subject of
lengthy memoirs by the donor and the late Hora-
tio Hale in the Journal of the Anthropological In-
stitute (xxvi. 3, pp. 221-54). Of these only the
barest summary is needful. The first and oldest
example, dating from before the middle of the
seventeenth century, is named the "Double Calu-
met Treaty Belt" (Figs. 8, 9). It is nine beads in

THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

width, and although imperfect, is still nearly four
feet long. On a dark ground of the costly purple
wampum there is the device of a council-hearth in
what was probablythe centre
of the belt, flanked on one side
by four and on the other side by three
double calumets, /.(f. double-headed peace-
pipes, each possessing a bowl at both ends.
Of course a pipe of this sort is of no use
for smoking. It is a creation of the
heraldic imagination, like the double-
headed eagle of some modern European
powers. This, first appearing on the
arms of the German Emperor in the
middle of the fourteenth century, may
have been derived through contact with

Fig. 9. — Double calumet council-heanh.

the East from Hittite bas-reliefs, as the
cherub of our grave-stone cutters is de-
rived through the Hebrews from the As-
syrians, and the symbolic design of the
Good Shepherd from the old type
of Hermes, the ram-bearing god.
Returning to the "double calumet," Mr. Hale
was told by Mandorong, an Indian chief, that

MEMORY-AIDS AND PICTURE-WRITING.

it was a peace-belt, representing an important
treaty or alliance of ancient times. The sec-
ond e.xample is called Peace-Path Belt, which
name indicates its purpose ; the third, of which a
good portion has probably vanished, is named
the Jesuit Missionary Belt (Fig. lo), and is be-

FiG. lo. — Jesuit missionary wampum.

lieved " to commemorate the acceptance by the
Hurons of the Christian religion " as taught by
the Jesuits.

The figures are worked on fifteen rows of
white beads on a dark ground, the oval or lozenge-
shaped design near the centre representing a
council. On each side of this are religious em-
blems— on one side the dove, on the other side
the lamb — and beyond each are Greek crosses
representing the Trinity. " The latest date which
can be ascribed to this belt is
the year 1648, the eve of the
expulsion of the Hurons by
the Iroquois." The fourth
example (Fig. 11), called the
" Four Nations' Alliance Belt,"
is sixty years younger, and, as
denoted by the four squares forming the chief
device, is a land-treaty made between the Wyan-
dotts and three Algonquin tribes.

This reference to records which mark a cer-
tain approach to the ideographic stage of writing
would be incomplete if no account was given of
the most celebrated wampum record in existencfe

Fig. II. — Four nations'
alliance wampum.

46 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

(Fig. ii«), the Penn Belt, preserved in the ar-
chives of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
It derives its name from a well-authenticated tra-
dition that it is the identical belt given, probably
in 1701, to William Penn by the Iroquois "to
confirm the friendly relations then permanently
established between them." It is composed of
eighteen strings of white wampum, thus evi-
dencing its relation to an important transaction,
and has in the centre two figures delineated in
dark-coloured beads, one an Indian grasping the

hand of a man

-^z^^; :■ .r, : :/-■ '.""f:^ ^^'ho, as wear-
<%tj "5^" '■'. '"' ' ■'' - " --^^h^-) ing a hat, is

^,. _-^^ doubtless m-

;..,...-. i ...;. ..„...,_:... tcndcd to rep-

resent a Euro-
pean. The oblique bands are the symbol of the
federation of Iroquois known as the " Five Na-
tions," and represent by synecdoche (or the put-
ting of a part for the whole) the entire native
Iroquois " long-house," as the communal dwelling
is called. " The Iroquois league is spoken of in
their Book of Rites as Kanastat-siko-cva, the 'great
framework.' It was this mighty structure, which,
when the belt in question was given, overshad-
owed the greater part of North America, that was
indicated by the rafters, shown as oblique bands."
(Hale, J. A. I. xxvi. p. 244.)

{b) The Pictorial Stage. — The necessity of
identifying personal as well as tribal property,
especially in land and live stock, led to the em-
ployment of various characters more or less pic-
tographic, which have their representatives in
signaries used in ancient commerce and in manu-
facturers' trade marks. Professor Ernst of Ca-

MEMORY-AIDS AND PICTURE-WRITING. 47

racas believes that he can recognise survivals of
Indian picture-writing in the marks used for
branding cattle; and among Mr. Arthur Evans's
remarkable discoveries of pre-Mjxenaijan relics
in Crete, the significance of which will be dealt
with later on, are seal-stones engraved with signs
which are not merely fanciful or ornamental, but
designed to convey information about their own-
ers. " For example, a boat with a crescent moon
on either side of the mast may have been the sig-
net of an ancient mariner who ventured on long
voyages ; " perchance a feat to be proud of, since
even a one-moon voyage seems to have been too
much for the average Homeric mariner {cf. Iliad,
II. 292-4). " Another signet, with a gate and a
pig on one of its faces, would be proper to a well-
to-do swineherd." Other seals bearing the de-
vice of a fish may indicate a fisherman ; of a
harp, a musician, and so on. ( The Mycencean Age,
p. 270 : Tsountas and Manatt.) The painful
operation of tattooing is known to have symbolic
and religious, even more than decorative, sig-
nificance, as marking the connection of the man
with his clan-totem or individual totem. But it
has also a utilitarian purpose, as among certain
Red Indian tribes, who tattoo both sexes, so that
in case of war the captured individuals may be
identified and ransomed. Totemic and mythic
animals are tattooed upon various parts of the
body ; in one case the design worn by a land-
owner among the Kavuya Indians of California
was used as his property mark by being cut or
painted upon boundary trees and posts, so that
his title to his possession was proved by the port-
able title-deed which he bore, reminding us of the
leading incident in Rider Haggard's Air. Meeson's

THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

IVi//. " In New Zealand the facial decorations
of a dead man were reproduced upon the trees
near his grave ; while among the Yakuts and
Bushmen the facial marks, or even totems, were
furthermore employed as property marks, the
Bushmen carving them upon growing squashes
and melons." (Hoffman, p. 39.) The various
Indian tribes appear to have made more frequent
use of the totem name rather than of the personal

name, perhaps be-
cause of the com-
mon barbaric notion
that a man's name
is an integral part
of himself, through"
which, whether he be
living or dead, mis-
chief may be wrought
by the sorcerer who
•^'mz/^m^^ knows the name—
^nr*-^^ a notion the force
ofwhich would be
lessened where the
name is generic and shared in common. On the
grave-posts of both Australian black fellows and
North American Indians the totem symbol is re-
versed, as in our medieeval chronicles the leop-
ards of English kings are reversed on the scutch-
eon, drawn opposite the record of their death.
With this we may connect the classic symbol of
the inverted torch which the modern sculptor de-
picts on funereal monuments. In his great work
on the History, Condition, and Prospects of the In-
dian Tribes, published over fifty years ago (a work,
however, which needs checking from other au-
thorities), Schoolcraft gives some illustrations of

Figs.

13. — Indian grave-posts

MEMORY-AIDS AND PICTURE-WRITING.

the red man's grave-posts, of which three are here
reproduced.

Fig. 12 shows the dead warrior's totem, a tor-
toise, and beside it. a headless man, which is a
common symbol of death among Indian tribes.
Below the trunk are three marks of honour. The
next and more elaborated figure (13) records the
achievements of Shingabawassin, a celebrated
chief of the St. Mary's band. His totem, the
crane, is shown reversed.
The three marks on the left
of the totem represent im-
portant general treaties of
peace to which he had been
a party ; the six strokes on
the right probably indicate
the number of big battles
which he fought. The pipe
appears to be a symbol of
peace, and the hatchet a
symbol of war. In like man-
ner headboards erected over
a woman have the various
articles used by her in life,
as cutting and sewing instru-
ments and weaving utensils,
depicted upon them. The
third example (14) repre-
sents the adjedatig or
tomb-board of Wabojeeg,
a celebrated war chief,
who died on Lake Supe-
rior about 1793. His to-
tem, the reindeer, is reversed, and his own name,
which means the White Fisher, is not recorded.
The seven strokes note the seven war parties

Fig.

— Tomb-board of In-
dian chief.

50 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

whom he led ; the three upright strokes as many
wounds received in battle. The horned head
tells of a desperate fight with a moose.

Fig. 15 is a reduced copy (Hoffman) of the
grave-board of an Innuit hunter. The vocation
of the dead man is shown in the baiiiarka, or boat,
in which he is depicted as rowing with a compan-
ion. The object beneath represents a rack for
drying fish and skins. Next to this are figures of
a fox and a land otter, and the network drawing
at the bottom is a copy of the hunter's summer
dwelling. These temporary structures denote
the abode of a skin-hunter, those used
by fishermen being dome-shaped. Hoff-
man adds that " this difterentiation in
the shape of roofs of habitations applies
to their pictorial representation and not
^ to their actual form." In close connec-
tion with these mortuary boards there
^^ is the ornamentation of door - posts
which we find among British Columbi-
an, Polynesian, and Maori tribes ; also
the carvings on canoes and other per-
FiG. 15 sonal effects to mark ownership or to

Hunter s . , . . , ■ 1 1 ^

grave-post, identify the property wath the totem.
But to pursue this would take us into
the domain of savage art generally, reference to
which is warranted here only in its mnemonic
uses as keeping alive knowledge of events which
would otherwise perish. Obviously, the examples
given above can fulfil only a limited purpose, be-
cause only the initiated can know their mean-
ing. As Dr. Tylor remarks, such mode of record
" may be compared to the elliptical forms of
expression current in all societies whose atten-
tion is given specially to some narrow subject

MEMORY-AIDS AND PICTURE-WRITING. 51

of interest, and where, as all men's minds have
the same framework set up in them, it is not
necessary to go into an elaborate description of
the whole state of things ; but one or two details
are enough to enable the hearer to understand
the whole. Such expressions as ' new white at
48,' ' best selected at 92 ' (' futures fairly active '
is a good example), though perfectly understood
in the commercial circles where they are current,
are as unintelligible to any one who is not famil-
iar with the course of events in those circles, as
an Indian record of a war-party would be to an
ordinary Londoner." {Early History of Mankind,
p. 86.) This applies with even greater force to
the large group of symbolic mnemonics whose
purpose is more restricted, whether it be as help
to the singer in his verses, to the medicine-man
in his incantation, to the hunter in his quest, or,
as among ourselves, to the tramp on his rounds.
The subjoined copy of a cadger's map (Fig. 16),
given in Hotten's Slafig Dictionary (1869), is an
addition to the number of survivals which are
found in so-called civilised communities, and has
fit place among the examples of pictorial mne-
monics in matters of i, love ; 2, sorcery ; 3, the
chase ; 4, war ; and 5, politics which follow it.

I. Love. — Fig. 17 is a reduced copy of a love-
letter, drawn upon birch bark (a material used
elsewhere, as among the Yukaghirs of Siberia),
which an Ojibwa girl sent to her sweetheart at
White Earth, Minnesota. She was of the " Bear "
totem, he of the " Mud Puppy " totem ; hence the
picture of these animals as representing the ad-
dresser and the addressee. The two lines from
their respective camps meet and are continued to
a point between two lakes, another trail branch-

Fig. i6. — A cadger's map of a begging district.

Explanation of the Hieroglyphics.
X No Good ; too poor, and know too much,
ot Stop. If you have what they want, they'll buy. They are

pretty ^_y (knowing),
a- Go this Way : better than the other road. Nothing that way.
% Bone (good). Safe for a " cold tatur." Cheese your patter

("don't talk much ).
V Cooper'd (spoilt) by too many tramps calling there.
a Gammy (unfavourable) ; likely to have you taken up. Mind

the dog.
O Flummuxed Cdangerous) ; sure of a month in quod (prison),
ffl Religious, but tidy on the whole.

MEMORY-AIDS AND PICTURE-WRITING.

ing off towards two tents. Here three girls,
Catholic converts, as denoted by the three crosses,
are encamped, the left-hand tent having an open-
ing from which an arm protrudes with beckoning

Fig. 17. — Ojibwa love-letter.

gesture. The arm is that of the writer of the let-
ter, who is making the Indian sign of welcome to
her lover. " This is done by holding the palm of
the hand down and forward, and drawing the ex-
tended index finger towards the place occupied

Fig. 18. — Love-song.

by the speaker, thus indicating the path upon the
ground to be followed by the person called."

Fig. 18 is the record of a love-song, i, rep-
resents the lover ; 2, he is singing and beating a
magic drum; in 3 he surrounds himself 'with a
secret lodge, denoting the effects of his necro-

THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

mancy ; in 4, he and his mistress are joined by a
single arm to show that they are as one ; in 5 she
is on an island; in 6 she sleeps, and as he sings,
his magical power reaches her heart ; and in 7
the heart itself is shown. To each of these fig-
ures a verse of the song corresponds.

1. It is my painting that makes me a god.

2. Hear the sounds of my voice, of my song ; it is my

voice.

3. I cover myself in sitting down by her.

4. I can make her blush, because I hear all she says of

me.

5. Were she on a distant island I could make her swim

over,

6. Though she were far off, even on the other hemi-

sphere.

7. I speak to your heart.

2. Sorcery. — Fig. 19 is the song of an Ojibwa
medicine-man incised upon birch bark. These
conjurers, who correspond to the Siberian sha-
mans, affect the usual mystery of the priestly

Fig. 19. — Mnemonic song of an Ojibwa medicine-man.

craft all the world over, and affirm, like those
who know better, that their thaumaturgic powers
are the direct gift of the god. Him they name
Manabozho — probably some ancestral deity, since
he is the great uncle of the anish'inabeg or
" first people." In i, Manabozho holds his bow

MEMORY-AIDS AND PICTURE-WRITING. 55

and arrow ; 2, represents the medicine-man's
drum and drumsticks used in chanting and in
initiation ceremonies; 3, a bar or rest observed
while chanting the incantation ; 4, the medicine-
bag, made of an otter skin, in which is preserved
the white cowrie shell as the sacred emblem of
the cult; 5, the medicine-man himself, horned to
show his superior power; 6, a funnel-like object,
known as a "jugglery," used in legerdemain and
other hocus pocus ; 7, a woman, signifying the
admission of her sex to "the society of the grand
medicine " ; 8, a bar or rest, as at 3 ; 9, the sacred
snake-skin medicine-bag, which has magic power ;
10, another woman; 11, another otter-skin " bag
o' tricks," showing that women members are al-
lowed to use it; 12, a female figure, holding a
branch of some sacred plant used in the exorcism
of the demon of disease. In any reference to
savage therapeutics it cannot be too often in-
sisted upon that diseases are never ascribed to
natural causes. "The Indians believed that dis-
eases were caused by unseen evil beings and by
witchcraft, and every cough, every toothache,
every headache, every fever, every boil, and every
wound, in fact all their ailments, were attributed
to such a cause. Their so-called medical prac-
tice was a horrible system of sorcery, and to
such superstition human life was sacrificed on an
enormous scale. ... In fact, a natural death in a
savage tent is a comparatively rare phenomenon ;
but death by sorcery, medicine, and blood-feud
arising from a belief in witchcraft is exceedingly
common." (Professor Powell's Indian Linguistic
Families of America North of Mexico^ p. 39.)

Fig. 20 records the destruction of an enemy
by an Ojibwa wabeno or bad medicine-man. The

56 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

box-like objects represent the four degrees of the
cult society to which the wabeno belonged, the
number of posts indicating the series. The figure
next to these is that of the assistant to the wabe-
no, who is shown with a waving line extending
from his mouth to the oval-like object intended
to represent a lake upon an island in which the
victim lives. He is shown prostrate beneath the
wabeno with a spot upon his breast, the small
oblong figure between the two being the sacred
drum. (See 2 in the foregoing illustration.) The
meaning of the pictograph is that the wabeno was
employed to work black magic on the man. He
took a piece of birch bark and cut upon it the

^(i« So ^

Fig. 20. — Wabeno destroying an enemy.

effigy of the victim, then, after beating the drum
to the chanting of incantations, he pierced the
breast of the efifigy, applying red paint to the
puncture. This, under the principle of " sympa-
thetic magic," was believed to bring about the
death of the victim, whom, through his living on
the island, the wabeno could not reach.

White magic, in which the beneficent powers
are at work, is illustrated by the Innuit picto-
graph on an ivory drill-bow (Fig. 21), on the
right of which are two huts, nearest to which
stands the medicine-man who has been called in
to exorcise the disease from a couple of sufferers.
He is catching hold of the animal by whose help
the disease-demon is expelled, or to whom, may-

MEMORY-AIDS AND PICTURE-WRITING. 57

hap, as a sort of scapegoat, the disease is trans-
ferred. In the second exorcism, the medicine-
man is grasping the patient by the arm, while he
chants the formulae wherewith to cast out the de-
mon. The figure on the left is making a gesture
of surprise at his relief, while beyond him are two

frs<: ^|r-^ ^^^

Fig. 21. — Etching on Innuit drill-bow.

demons struggling to escape beyond the power of
the medicine-man.

3. TAe Chase. — Fig. 22 records a hunting ex-
pedition. The two lines represent a wave-tossed
river, on which floats a bark canoe, guided by the
owner. In the bow a piece of birch bark shields
a fire of pine knots to light up the course taken

Fig. 22. — Ojibwa hunting record.

by the steersman. By this means the game, as it
comes to the water to drink, can be seen from the
shaded part of the canoe, in front of which two
deer are shown. Next to these is a circle repre-
senting a lake, from which peep the head and
horns of a third deer. To the right of the lake a
doe appears, and beyond her the two wigwams of
the hunter. The four animals may represent the
quarry secured.

Fig. 23, drawn on a buffalo shoulder-blade by
a Hidatsa Indian, tells his efforts to track com-
panions who had gone buffalo-hunting. The trail

THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

of the animal and the pursuers is shown in the
dotted lines. Of the three heads the lowest is
that of the seeker, who is depicted shouting after
his missing friends; then he is shown advancing
and still shouting, till his call is returned from the
spot where the hunters have camped.

Fig. 24, incised on an ivory drill-bow, is a
pictograph of an Alaskan sea-lion hunt. In i,
the speaker points with his left hand in the direc-
tion to be taken, and, 2, holds a paddle to show
that a voyage is intended. In 3,
the right hand to the side of the
head denotes sleep, while the left
hand with one finger elevated means
one night. The circle with two
dots in the middle, 4, signifies an
island with huts ; 5 is the same as
I ; 6 is another island ; 7 is the same
as 3, but with two fingers elevated
to indicate two nights. In 8 the
speaker with his harpoon makes the
sign of a sea-lion with his left hand,
which he thrusts outward and down-
ward in a slight curve to represent
the animal swimming; 9, 10, a sea-
lion shot at with bow and arrow;
II, two men in a boat, the paddles
pushed downwards; and 12, the speaker's hut.
The native account, as translated, reads thus:
" I there go that island, one sleep there ; then
I go another that island, there two sleeps ; I
catch one sea-lion, then return mine." (Colonel
Mallery, quo. Hoffman, Transactions of the Anthro-
pological Society, \N2t.s\\\ng'ion, vol. ii. p. 134, 1883.)
" Hunters who have been unfortunate, and are
starving, scratch or draw upon a piece of wood

Fig. 23. — Hidat-
sa pictograph
on a buffalo
shoulder-blade.

MEMORY-AIDS AND PICTURE-WRITING. 59

characters like those in Fig. 25, and place the
lower end of the stick in the ground on the trail
where it is most likely to be discovered," the stick
being inclined towards the hunter's dwelling. The
horizontal line i denotes a canoe, 2, the gesture
of the man with both arms extended signifies

I 2 34567 8 9 10 II 12

Fig. 24. — Alaskan hunting record.

"nothing," while the uplifting of the right hand
to the mouth, 3, means "food" or "to eat," and
the left hand outstretched points to 4, the hut of
the famished man. Here we are actually within
the ideographic stage, and, as will be shown in
due course, handling material identical in char-
acter with that found in Egypt and other nations
of antiquity. But, as already remarked, and as
will be evidenced in abundance throughout these

• 2 3 «

Fig. 25. — Record of starving hunter.

pages, there are no well-marked divisions between
the stages of development.

A varied interest attaches to Fig. 26, which
depicts some general features of Alaskan life on
a piece of walrus tusk. In i, a native is resting
against his house, and on his right stands a pole
surmounted by a bird, apparently a totem-post. 2.
A reindeer. 3. One man shooting at another with
an arrow. 4. An expedition in a dog-sledge, and.

THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

5, in a boat with sail and paddle. 6. A dog-sledge,
with the sun above; perhaps indicating the com-
ing of summer. 7. A sacred lodge. The four
figures at each outer corner represent young men
armed with bows and arrows to
keep off the uninitiated from the
forbidden precincts.
The members of the
occult society are
dancing round a fire
in the centre of the
lodge. 8. A pine
tree up which a por-
cupine is climbing.
9. Another pine tree,
from which a wood-
pecker is extracting
larvae. 10. A bear,
II, 12. Men driving
fish into, 13, the net,
above them being a
captured whale, with
harpoon and line at-
tached.

4. JFar. — School-
craft, who has been
already drawn upon
for an example (page
48), records the find-
ing of the bark let-
ter copied in Fig.
27. It was fastened
to the top of a pole
so as to attract the notice of other Indians who
might happen to be passing. Beginning on the
right of the middle row we have i, the officer in

Fig. 26. — Alaskan hunting life.

MEMORY AIDS AND PICTURE-WRITIXG.

command, sword in hand; 2, his secretary, and 3,
the geologist of the party, indicated by his ham-
mer. Then follow
4, 5, two attaches;
6, the interpreter ;
and 7, 8, two Chip-
pewa guides. In the
top row is 9, 10, a
group of seven sol-
diers, armed with
muskets. A prairie
hen and tortoise, 11,
12, represent the
animals secured for
food.

Fig. 28 gives the biography of Wingemund, a
noted Delaware chief. To the left is i, the tor-

FlG. 27. — Indian expedition.

Fig. 28. — Biography of Indian chief.

toise totem of the tribe ; then 2, the chief-totem ;
and 3, the sun, beneath which are ten strokes rep-

THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

resenting the ten expeditions in which Wingemund
took part. On the opposite side are indicated,
4> 5) 6, 7, the prisoners of both sexes taken, and
also the killed, these last being drawn as headless.
In the centre are the several positions attacked,
8, 9, lo, II ; and the slanting strokes at the bot-
tom denote the number of Wingemund's followers.
Fig. 29 is a war-song. Wings are given to the
warrior, i, to show that he is swift-footed ; in 2 he
stands under the morning star, and in 3 under the
centre of heaven, with his war-club and rattle; in

Fig. 29. — War-song.

4, the eagles of carnage are flying round the sky;
in 5, the warrior lies slain on the battlefield ; while
in 6 he appears as a spirit in the sky. The words
of the song are as follows : —

1. I wish to have the body of the swiftest bird.

2. Every day I look at you ; the half of the day I sing my

song.

3. I throw away my body.

4. The birds take a flight in the air.

5. Full happy am I to be numbered with the slain.

6. The spirits on high repeat my name.

MEMORY-AIDS AND PICTURE-WRITING

<^. Political
ancl Social. —
The frontis-
piece is a copy
of a petition
sent by a
group of In-
dian tribes to
the United
States Con-
gress for fish-
ing rights in
certain small
lakes near
Lake Superi-
or. The lead-
ing clan is
represented
by Oshcaba-
wis, whose to-
tem is I, the
crane ; then
follow 2, Wa-
imitligzhig ;
3, Ogemagee;
and 4, a third,
all of the
marten to-
tem; 5, Little
Elk, of the
bear totem ;
6, belongs to
the manfish
totem; 7, to
the catfish to-
tem.

64 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

From the eye and heart of each of the animals
runs a line connecting them with the eye and heart
of the crane to show that they are all of one
mind, and the eye of the crane has also a line
connecting it with the lakes on which the tribes
want to fish, while another line runs towards
Congress.

Fig. 30 is a copy of a letter found above St.
Anthony's Falls in 1820. "It consisted of white
birch bark, and the figures had been carefully
drawn, i, Denotes the flag of the Union ; 2, the
cantonment then recently established at Cold
Spring, on the western side of the cliffs; 4 is the
symbol of Colonel Leavenworth, the commanding
officer, under whose authority a mission of peace
had been sent into the Chippewa country; 11 is
the symbol of Chakope, the leading Sioux chief,
under whose orders the party moved ; 8 is the
second chief, named Wabedatunka, or, 10, the
Black Dog, who has fourteen lodges, 7 is a chief
also subordinate to Chakope, with thirteen lodges,
and 9 is a bale of goods devoted by the Govern-
ment to the objects of the peace. The name of
6, whose wigwam is 5, with thirteen subordinate
lodges, was not given." The letter was written
to make known the fact that Chakope and his fol-
lowers, accompanied or supported by the Ameri-
can officer, had come to the spot to make peace
with the Chippewa hunters. " The Chippewa chief,
Babesacundabee, who found the letter, read off its
meaning without doubt or hesitation." (School-
craft, vol. i. p. 352.)

Fig. 31 represents the census roll of an Indian
band at Mille Lac, in the territory of Minnesota,
sent in to the United States agent by Nagonabe,
a Chippewa Indian, during the annuity payments

MEMORY-AIDS AND PICTURE-WRITING. 65

in 1849. As the Indians were all of the same
totem, Nagonabe "designated each family by a

^
^

.III

C-)

null

-t

II I

^^^

1 1

nil

Fig. 31. — Census roll of an Indian band.

sign denoting the common name of the chief.
Thus 5 denotes a catfish, and the six strokes indi-

66 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

cate that the Catfish's family consisted of six indi-
viduals ; 8 is a beaver skin ; 9, a sun ; 13, an eagle ;
14, a snake; 22, a buffalo; 34, an axe; 35, the
medicine-man, and so on." (Lubbock, Origin of
Civilisation, p. 47.)

Fig. 32 supplies a striking example of the cum-
bersomeness of the pictograph as contrasted with
the sound-symbol. It is a copy of a record which
an Innuit placed over the door of his dwelling to

notify to his friends

> ■>■ -^ ^ '- (> -J % that he had gone on

* ^ * T A *" if lf a journey. The per-

i^,^ p A lA ^ sons thus notified

Fig. 32. — Record of departure • j- , •

(Innuit). are indicated in i, 3,

5, 7 ; 2 is the speaker,
who denotes the direction in which he is leaving
by his extended left hand; 4 is the gesture sign
for "many," and 6 for sleep, the upraising of the
left hand showing that he will be some distance
away; 8, his intended return is denoted by the
right hand being pointed homeward, while the
left arm is bent to denote return.

{c) The Ideographic Stage. — As the characters
pass from the pictorial to the emblematic or the
symbolic, their meaning, obviously, becomes more
obscure, save to the initiated. " They do not," as
Colonel Mallery remarks, "depict, but suggest
objects; do not speak directly through the eye to
the intelligence, but presuppose in the mind knowl-
edge of an event or fact which the sign recalls.
The symbols of the ark, dove, olive-branch, and
rainbow would be wholly meaningless to people
unfamiliar with the Mosaic or some similar cos-
mology, as would be the cross and the crescent to
those ignorant of history." And even in pictog-
raphy, as the same excellent authority observes,

MEMORY-AIDS AND PICTURE-WRITING. 67

" it is very difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish
between historical and traditional accounts ob-
tained from Indians. The winter counts {i.e. the
reckoning of time by winters, and the applying of
names instead of numbers to them, as, e.g., * catch-
ing-wild-horses winter,' the device for which was
a lasso), while having their chief value as calendars,
contain some material that is absolute and verifi-
able tribal history." The difficulties of interpre-
tation, as the examples given evidence, are in the
larger number being "merely mnemonic records,
and treated in connection with material objects
formerly, and perhaps still, used mnemonically."
(Mallery, " On the Pictographs of the North Amer-
ican Indians," Fourth Annual Report of the Bureau
of Ethnology, 1886.)

The signs of advance from the pictorial to the
ideographic stage which are to be noted among
the Red Indians, are more sharply marked in the
hieroglyphs and phonetic characters on the stone
monuments and manuscripts found among the
relics of the vanished peoples of Mexico and
Yucatan.

A number of fatuous theories about the con-
nection of Central American culture with that of
the Old World have been broached, from the time
when Lord Kingsborough published his lavishly-
illustrated book to prove that the ancient Mexi-
cans were the descendants of the lost Ten Tribes
of Israel to the present day, when Dr. Augustus
Le Plongeon brings us his " proofs " that Yucatan
was the primitive home of Adam, and avers that
he has discovered not only the grave of Abel, but
disinterred his heart therefrom, and found the
knife wherewith Cain slew him ! {Queen Moo and
the Egyptian Sphinx, p. 138.) Now, among the cer-

68 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

tainties which modern research has reached is that
of the independent origin and development of
civiHsation in the New World. Man himself,
whether or not descended from a single pair, had
his origin in one region, probably the Indo-Malay-
sian, since there we find his nearest congeners,
the anthropoid apes, while the pliocene beds of
Java have recently yielded a remarkable corrobo-
ration of the theory in the fossil bones which
bring man near to the common stem whence the
highest animals have diverged. At a period when
the general temperature of the globe was milder
than now, the ancestors of the existing four lead-
ing groups — the Ethiopic, Mongolic, American,
and Caucasic — spread themselves over the several
zones of the habitable world, the American group
migrating from Asia and Europe across the then
existing land-connection between those continents
and the New World, where those various stages
of development which are still to be witnessed
from the Arctic regions to Cape Horn were reached.
Of these the Mexican plateau affords interesting
and valuable material in the chipped flint imple-
ments evidencing a Stone Age, and in the mar-
vellous buildings which vie both in their Cyclo-
pean dimensions and ornamental features with the
palaces, tombs, and temples of Egypt and Assyria,
testifying to the relatively high culture of the
races that raised them. These peoples, usually
grouped together as the ancient Mexicans, are
known as Mayas and Aztecs. The duration of
the empire or confederation of the Mayas is un-
known, but about two hundred years before the
Spanish conquest of America they appear to have
been invaded and subdued by the Aztecs, whose
rule extended from the Atlantic to the Pacific in

MEMORY-AIDS AND PICTURE-WRITING. 69

the countries now forming Mexico and portions
of the United States. The remains of the two
races are both imperfect and entangled, so that
any coherent story is not to be extracted from
them. But the evidence points to the Mayas as
the intellectually superior race; the Aztecs, who
still form the bulk of the population of South
Mexico, borrowing largely from them, especially
in the matter of the gods. " If written language
be a test of intelligence, the Mayas were ahead
not only of the Mexican people, but also of the
Peruvians. The latter are believed to have made
no nearer advance towards writing than the tying
of tally-knots on strings, and the Mexicans, while
they had invented paper, wrote down their ideas,
save in the cases of a few phonetic signs, as chil-
dren would, by means of pictures ; but the Mayas,
like the Egyptians, had proceeded beyond pictures
to hieroglyphs, where symbols, more or less arbi-
trary, stand for words or syllables, and the mind
prepares itself to invent an alphabet." (Mercer's
Hill Caves of Yucatan, p. 73.) Some of the more
remarkable hieroglyphic-bearing monuments of
the Mayas have been found in the palace of Pa-
lenque, the Spanish name of the old Yucatan cap-
ital. They are on stucco slabs above figures some
of which show curious correspondence to Egyptian
statues, wearing the pleasant but immobile expres-
sion of the latter, and decorated with a similar
headdress, while in one case (Fig. 2)Z^^ a cartouche
enclosing an inscription is carved on the plinth.
The concluding panels of one of the codices form
what may be called the Mexican Book of the
Dead. It enforces the scheme of duty which
precedes by vividly depicting the trial and judg-
ment of the soul after death, and detailing the

THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

perils of the journey on the way to Mictlan (Payne,
ii. 407).

Time and fanaticism have made sad havoc
with the manuscripts, and no satisfactory key to
their decipherment has been found, only a few
words here and there being interpreted. They
were executed m bright and varied colours, with
a feather pencil, on prepared skins,
paper, or rolls of cotton or aloe-fibre
cloth, and the pictographic system
thus created was applied to the pur-
poses of ordinary life, and served as
a species of writing. Matters of
only passing importance were re-
corded on fibrous paper made from
the leaves of the maguey plant ;
"records intended to be permanent-
ly kept were painted on the prepared
skins of animals, those of the deer
and bear being more commonly used.
These paintings or ' pinturos ' are
usually executed on both sides of
the skin, which was oblong in shape
and often of great length, having the
ends protected by boards." (Payne's
History of the Neiv World called
America, vol. ii. p. 404.) These boards are called
analtees, a word which may be translated annals.
1 he earlier hieroglyphic characters were executed
by priests, who were required to be old men, wid-
owers, and under vows of chastity and seclusion.
Such writing was known only to the initiated.

Tradition says that the Aztecs destroyed many
of the Maya picture records because they recalled
the grandeur of the conquered people. But the
Spaniards in their turn destroyed much more.

Fig. 33.— Statue
from Palenque.

MEMORY-AIDS AND PICTURE-WRITING. 71

Zumarraga, Bishop of Mexico, and Landa, Bishop
of Yucatan, made such bonfires of carvings, stat-
ues, paintings on wood, and of priceless picture
and hieroglyph writings on native paper and deer-
skin, that only about half-a-dozen fragments of
the Yucatan books have ever been found since.
Bishop Landa, probably from knowledge obtained
from Maya priests, attempted the framing of a
key of interpretation, his aim being the transla-
tion of certain religious and devotional writings
for the use of converts. In this he indicates a
certain number of alphabetic characters, but the
key did not work, and Dr. Isaac Taylor draws the
conclusion that "the systems of picture-writing
which were invented and developed by the tribes
of Central America are so obscure, and so little
is known about their history, that they must be
regarded rather as literary curiosities than as
affording suitable materials for enabling us to ar-
rive at any general conclusions as to the nature of
the early stages of the development of the graphic
art." {Hist. Alph., i. 24.) Notwithstanding this
somewhat sweeping verdict, the IVIaya-Aztec
scripts have value, if only for purposes of com-
parison. There is preserved in the museum at
Mexico a whole -series of pictographs exhibiting
incidents as varied as the migrations of tribes, the
annals of the people, sacrifices to the gods, and
the education of children, the tasks set them, the
punishments inflicted on them, and the food given
them. To the hieroglyph there succeeds the
gradually conventionalised sign, of which exam-
ples from Red Indian scripts have been given:
— the arrow to denote an enemy ; several arrows,
several enemies ; the direction of the arrow's
point, the direction taken by the enemy"; a piece

72 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

of maize cake protruding from the mouth, to de-
note eating; the symbol for water between the
lips, to signify drinking ; horizontal lines, with
arrow-headed characters on them, to denote the
hoed or cultivated ground, some of these ideo-
graphs being coloured to correspond with the
thing suggested ; and, as an example of the more
abstruse, the extended arms, probably to denote
negation — all marking the advance to phonetic
syllabic writing. The names of persons and places
are sometimes indicated by symbolic figures; e.^.
Chapultepec, or "grasshopper hill," is represented
by a hill and a grasshopper; Tzompanco, "the
place of skulls," by a skull on a bar between two
posts, as enemies' skulls used to be set up; and
Macuilxochitl, the " five flowers," by five dots and
a flower. Sometimes we find the species of pun
known as the redus adopted. A picture is made
to stand for the sound of the word, as e.g. among
ourselves in guessing games, when a whisk broom
and a key stand for " whiskey/' or in the series of
pictures of an eye, a saw, a boy, a swallow, a
goose, and a berry, which stand for the sentence,
" I saw a boy swallow a gooseberry." In Abbot
Islip's Chapel in Westminster Abbey his name is
rebused as an eye and the slip of a tree with the
hand apparently of a slipping man hanging to it.
In Bishop Oldham's chantry in Exeter Cathedral
his name is represented by an owl (Owle-dom, the
old spelling of the name) ; and in St. Saviour's
Church the name of Prior Burton is sculptured as
a cask with a thistle on it, "burr-tun."

(d) The Phonetic Stage. — The ancient Mexican
script supplies examples of the change from the
pictographic to the phonetic stage. The name of
one of the kings was Itzcoatl, or " Knife-Snake."

MEMORY-AIDS AND PICTURE-WRITING.

Fig. 34.
Itzcoatl.

In the manuscript known as the Le Tellier Codex
this king's name (Fig. 34) is represented by a ser-
pent {coatl) with stone knives [itzli) upon its back.
This IS mere picture-writing, but in the Vergara
Code.x we find the rebus form (Fig. 35).
"The first syllable, //s, is represented
by a weapon armed with blades of ob-
sidian, itz {tli), but the rest of the word,
coatl, though it means snake, is written,
not by a picture of a snake, but by an
earthen pot, co [?nitl), and above it the
sign of water a [il). Here we have
real phonetic w-riting, for the name is
not to be read, according to sense,
' knife-kettle-water,' but only accord-
ing to the sound of the Aztec words, Itz-co-atl."
Dr. Tylor adds that there is no sufficient reason
to make us doubt that this purely phonetic writing
was of native Mexican origm, and that after the
Spanish Conquest it was turned to account in a
new and curious way. The Spanish missionaries,
when embarrassed by the difficulty of
getting the converts to remember their
Ave Af arias and Paternosters, seeing that
the words were, of course, mere non-
sense to them, were helped out by the
Indians themselves, who substituted Az-
tec words as near in sound as might be
to the Latin, and wrote down the pic-
tured equivalents for these words, which enabled
them to remember the required formulas. Tor-
quemada and Las Casas have recorded two in-
stances of this device. Pater noster was written
by a flag {pantli) and a prickly pear {nochtli), while
the sign of water, a [tl), combined with that of
aloe, me [tl), made a compound word, ametl, which

Fig. 35.
Rebus of
Itzcoatl.

74 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

would mean " water-aloe," but in sound made a
very tolerable substitute for Amen. M. Aubin
found the beginning of a Paternoster of this kind
in the metropolitan library of Mexico (Fig. 36),
made with a flag, /d:« (///), a stone, te (t/), a prick-
ly pear, noc/i {tli), and again a stone, te (tl), which

would read Pa-te-noch-te, or

D tin f> Cin perhaps Pa - tetl - noch - tetl.

* ^^ ^ ^^ After the conquest, when the

FIG. 36.-PaTernoster Spani^ards were hard at work

rebus. mtroducmg their own religion

and civilisation among the
conquered Mexicans, they found it convenient to
allow the old picture-writing still to be used even
in legal documents. It disappeared in time, of
course, being superseded in the long run by the
alphabet, and it is to this transition period that
we owe many, perhaps most, of the picture docu-
ments still preserved. "One of the picture-writ-
ings in the museum at Mexico is very probably
the same that was sent up to Vera Cruz, to Mon-
tezuma, with figures of newly-arrived white men,
their ships and horses, and their cannon with fire
and smoke issuing from their mouths." (Ty-
lor, Anahuac, p. 232.) In the general history of
the development of writing, the Mexican script
therefore supplies us only with an example of ap-
proximation to the phonetic system, its advance
to the final alphabetic stage being probably ar-
rested by the subjugation of the Mayas to an in-
tellectually inferior conqueror, who, borrowing
much, and contributing nothing of advantage,
himself yielded to the superior force of Spain.

CHINESE, JAPANESE, AND COREAN SCRIPTS. 75
CHAPTER IV.

THE CHINESE, JAPANESE, AND COREAN SCRIPTS.

China, whose inertia is being aroused by for-
eign " pin-pricks," is the land of arrested develop-
ments, and consequently its writing has remained
for probably two thousand years at a rudimentary
stage, furnishing an interesting object-lesson on
the early processes of advance, after the disuse of
knotted cords (see p. 39), from the Ku-wdn, or
" ancient pictures," to the Ling-s/iing, or " pictures
and sounds." The language has never got be-
yond the monosyllabic stage; it has no termina-
tions to denote number, case, tense, mood, or per-
son, the same word without change of form being
used as a noun, verb, or other " part of speech,"
so that a sentence can be construed only by the
place of the several words composing it. As Dr.
Marshman tersely puts it, "the whole of Chinese
grammar depends upon position." For example,
while the root-meaning of ta is "being great," it
may, as a noun, mean " greatness " ; as an adjec-
tive, "great"; as a verb, "to be great," or "to
make great " ; and as an adverb, "greatly." And,
moreover, not only position, but also tone and
gesture, contribute to the interpretation of the
spoken language.

The characters fall into six we?i or classes : —

1, pictorial, giving a picture of the thing itself ;

2, indicative, i. e. designed by their form and the
relation of their parts to suggest the idea in the
mmd of their inventor; 3, composite, i. e. made up
of two characters, the meanings of which blend in
the meanings of the compounds ; 4, inverted, or, as

76 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

the term implies, topsy-turvy; 5, borro7ocd, i.e.
having another meaning attached to them ; (y., pho-
netic, i. e. one part indicating the sense and an-
other part the sound. In Chinese phrase the
ideogram is the "mother of meaning "and the
phonogram the " mother of sound." The mate-
rials used largely determine the form which writ-
ing takes, and in the modern or cursive characters
which are shown underneath the primitive forms
we see the result of use of the rabbit's-hair pencil
of the Chinese scribe. Respecting the first class,
it sufifices to say little, because it explains itself
(Fig. 37). The sun was drawn as a circle, the

Sun. Moon. Mountain. Tree. S nc; (an ear Light,
and a birdi.

Fig. 37. — Chinese picture-writing and later uncial.

moon as a crescent, a mountain was indicated by
three peaks, rain by drops under an arch, and so
forth. But, as has been sufficiently shown, such
devices carry us a very little way ; there is no
literature possible under a mere graphic system.
The third, or composite class, is the most inter-
esting as supplying the key to the common idea
of the character represented. Sometimes the
characters indicate a dry humour. A '• wife " is
denoted by the signs for " female " and " broom,"
a sort of metonymy for a woman's household
work ; for a male child the signs " field " and
" strength " are used, because he will till the soil.
The Chinese, it will be remembered, are a purely
agricultural people, and the compound for "profit"

CHINESE, JAPANESE, AND COREAN SCRIPTS. 77

is "grain" and "a knife." The cliaracters for
"mountain" and "man" signify "hermit"; an
" eye " and " water " mean " tears " ; and the verb
"to listen" is indicated by an ear between two
doors. The signs for the noonday sun are the
" sun " and "to reign"; "light" as an abstract
quality is represented by figures of the sun and
moon placed side by side ; a " man " and " two "
stand for mankind ; a couple of women stand for
"strife," three for " intrigue," while a "woman
under two trees " means " desire " or "covetous-
ness." But the inadequacy of these and the other
symbols to supply characters for the demands of
a language in which the same sound has to stand
for a multitude of ideas gave rise to the phonetic
group, whose development from picture-writing
more or less ideographic took place many centu-
ries B. c. The primary symbols or combinations
of vowels and consonants number about four hun-
dred and fifty. The variations in tone in pro-
nouncing these sounds increase the total of mono-
syllabic words to be understood by the ear to
something over twelve hundred. But the Chinese
dictionaries contain above forty thousand words,
and it is the symbols for each of these which are
provided by the phonetic symbols. These were
compound signs, the first character, as shown
above, being a phonogram or sound-word, and
the second character a determinative, /'. e. ideo-
gram or sense-word. They are, as Professor
Whitney says, "rather an auxiliary language than
a reduction of speech to writing." The sign for
"man " has nearly six hundred combinations, all
denoting something relating to man ; that for
"tree" has about nine hundred, to indicate vari-
ous kinds of trees and wood, things made of

78 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

wood, and so forth ; while, to borrow a concrete
example,/^, which means "white," has, with a
" tree " prefixed, the meaning of " cypress " ; with
the sign for "man" it means "elder brother";
with the sign for "manes" it means the vital
principle that survives death ; and so forth. Chow
is the Chinese word for "ship," so a picture of a
ship stands for the sound cho'io. But the word
choiu means several other things, and the deter-
minative or "^ key " sign indicates these. "Thus
the ship joined with the sign of water stands for
chow, ' ripple ' ; with that of speech for cho7v, ' lo-
quacity ' ; with that of fire for cho7c>, ' flickering of
flame,' and so on for ' waggon-pole,' ' fluff,' and
several other things which have little in common
but the name of chow " (Tylor, p. 102). Although,
theoretically, the Chinaman has to make an enor-
mous number of characters before he can write
his own language, so that, at the age of twenty-
five, a diligent student has barely acquired the
same amount of facility in reading and writing
which is usually attained by an English child —
using the twenty-six characters of his alphabet —
at the age of ten ; practically some four or five
thousand characters suffice for average needs, and
the convenience of " a system enabling those who
speak mutually unintelligible idioms to converse
together, using the pencil instead of the tongue,"
caused the abandonment of an attempt to make
nearer approach to an alphabetic system which
was promoted by the Chinese Government some
centuries ago.

In contrast to this, the Japanese, with that
pliability which has helped to put them in the van
of Oriental peoples, selected, as a result of con-
tact with Buddhism, which came to them by way

CHINESE, JAPANESE, AND COREAN SCRIPTS. 79

of China, certain signs from the wilderness of
Chinese characters, and constituted these as their
alphabet or irofa, so called, >on the acrologic
principle (p. 94), from the names of its first
signs, like our alphabet from alpha, beta. Their
language being polysyllabic, involved the result
that whatever signs were used must be syllabic,
and hence the adoption of a syllabary was easy.
But, of course, like all syllabaries, this has the
defect of necessitating the use of that larger
number of^ signs with which the alphabet dis-
penses. The origin of the Japanese syllabaries,
of which there are two, dates from the end of the
ninth century of our Lord. One, the Hirakana,
derived from a cursive form of Chinese called the
tsau or "grass" character, contains about three
hundred syllabic sound-signs; the other, known
as the Katakana, is derived from the kyai or
" model " type of the Chinese character, and is
the simpler of the two in having only a single
character for each of the forty-seven syllabic
sounds in the Japanese language. But neither
demands detailed treatment here, since with the
intrusion of the Roman alphabet among Western
imports into Japan its substitution for the cum-
brous syllabaries is probably only a matter of
brief time, and the Japanese script may then take
its place with the Maya and the Aztec as a graphic
curiosity.

Chinese is the official script of Corea, but the
lower classes use a phonetic alphabet which, in
the judgment of some authorities, is derived from
a cursive form of the Nagari script of India, hav-
ing, so it is thought, been introduced by Buddhist
teachers. Both past and present times afford
striking examples of the influence of religion in

THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

the diffusion of alphabets, missionaries obviously
making use of their own alphabet in the transla-
tion of their sacred books into the language of
their converts. Whatever connection there may
have been between Corean and
Indian scripts is not, however,
traceable, owing to the changes
in the former. But in truth we
know little about the matter,
and there is something to be
said in support of an old tradi-
tion that King Se-jo, who
reigned five hundred years ago,
commanded his chief gramma-
rian, Song Sammun, to devise
an alphabet that should super-
sede the cumbersome Chinese;
whereupon that scholar took
the Tibetan characters as foun-
dation, but as those were only
consonantal, he turned to the
ancient Chinese and trans-
formed six of its simplest rad-
icals into the Corean vowels,
naming the vowels and consonants " mother " and
" child " respectively. The letters were " bunched
together " so as to look like the Chinese charac-
ters (Fig. 38), the purpose being " to facilitate the
transliteration of the Chinese te.xt in a parallel
column." There is a curious tradition, reminding
us of the Chinese legend of the origin of writing,
that the Corean characters were suggested by the
straight and oblique lattice-work of the native
doors.

Fig. 38. — Chinese and
Tibetan triglot.

CUNEIFORM WRITING. 8 1

CHAPTER V.

CUNEIFORM WRITING.

Thus far curiosity alone gives the stimulus to
acquaintance with ancient scripts — a feeling of
aloofness attending all that we learn of Chinese,
Maya, and other systems having no historical
connection (for the derivation of Chinese from
pre-Babylonian writing is not proved) with those
from which our alphabet is probably derived.
With the story of these the real interest begins,
because within some of them lie the sources of
the alphabets of the civilised world, while all of
them have borne a share in the preservation of
intellectual and spiritual treasures, the loss of
which would have arrested the progress of the
vigorous sections of mankind.

Dealing first with those of Mesopotamia, a
romance, not lacking excitement, gathers round
the wedge-shaped or cuneiform characters (Lat.
cuneiis, "a wedge") inscribed on clay tablets and
cylinders, and on the great monuments of Assyria,
fjabylon, and other Oriental empires of past re-
nown. The very existence of these relics was
forgotten for some sixteen hundred years, and
when they were unearthed from the rubbish-
heaps of centuries, no one dreamed that any seri-
ous meaning was to be attached to the fantastic
angular-shaped characters which covered bricks
and tablets. In 1621, Pietro della Valle, a Span-
ish traveller, visited the famous ruins of Persepo-
lis, and he appears to have been the first to sus-
pect that the arrow-headed signs were inscrip-
tions, although he was unable to decipher them.

82 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

He, however, made the shrewd observation that
as the thick end of the supposed letters was never
at the right but at the left of the oblique char-
acters, the signs must have been written from
left to right.

"Built on a great platform, artificially con-
structed for the purpose, which commands a wide
plain, and has a lofty mountain shaped like an
amphitheatre at its rear, the stranger ascends the
spot by a magnificent staircase, or pair of stair-
cases, which separate in opposite directions to
meet at the summit. Here are the gigantic re-
mains of several palaces, great porticos with winged
bulls and reliefs representing gods and princes.
In the live rock of the mountains at the rear
tombs have been hewn, evidently to receive the
occupants of the palaces, and all the rocks and
walls are covered with the cuneiform or arrow-
headed inscriptions, consisting of very simple ele-
ments, which are nothing but thin wedges and

gles I T>^^but with these elements com-
bined m wonderful variety. . . . But no record of
the language or its import had survived, and the
ignorant inhabitants of the neighbourhood looked
upon the texts with greater awe than they did the
winged monsters that loomed over the plain. They
were to them symbols of magic import, which, if
duly pronounced, would unlock the hidden treas-
ures guarded by the lions and the bulls." (Ma-
haffy's Prolegomena to Ancient History, p. 168.)

The savants of the seventeenth century were
not " wiser in their generation " than the rude
nomads who pitched their tents under the shadow
of the stone monsters. Many years after Delia
Valle's visit the Oriental scholar, Hyde, in a

CUNEIFORM WRITING. 83

book on the Ancient Persian Religion, soberly
suggested that the signs were designed by some
fantastic architect to show into how many com-
binations the same kind of stroke would enter.
It is a wonder that he did not, with equal sobriety,
suggest that they were related to the well-known
Norman " hatchet-work." And so the guessing
went on. One antiquary contended that they
were talismanic signs ; another that they were
mystic formulae of the priests, or astrological
symbols of the old Chaldean star-worshippers ;
another saw in them a species of revealed digital
language wherewith the Creator talked to Adam,
whence the primitive speech of mankind was de-
rived ; while others conjectured them to be Chi-
nese, or Samaritan, or Runic, or Ogam characters.
Most fantastic of all, one ingenious theorist saw
in them the action of numberless generations of
worms !

But by the middle of the eighteenth century a
sane school of investigators had found its leader.
A great traveller, Carsten Niebuhr, father of the
famous historian of early Rome, was the first to
divine the true character of the inscriptions. He
agreed with Delia Valle that they were written
from left to right, and he saw that they were
made up of three different sets of characters, each
meaning the same thing. But beyond showing,
in his careful transcript published in 1764, that
one of the three scripts was simpler in character
than the others — all, as he assumed, being alpha-
betic varieties of one language — he could not go.
The meaning still remained a mystery. Thirty
years later, Munter, a Danish philologist, cor-
rectly guessed that the diagonal barA, which

84 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

occurred frequently, was a sign for the separa-
tion of words, and, next, he discovered the vowel
signs, which, as distinct characters, are absent
from the Hebrew and other Semitic languages.
This was a great step towards final decipherment.
Herodotus (i. 125, &c.) speaks of the Achsmenid
dynasty of Persian kings who were the lords of
Asia in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. The
ruins of Persepolis are identified as the remains
of their palaces. Of this royal house the famous
Darius was a member, and Herodotus tells how
that monarch, " having gazed upon the Bosphorus,
set up two pillars by it of white stone with char-
acters cut upon them, on the one Assyrian and
on the other Hellenic, being the names of all
the nations which he was leading with him " (iv.
87). The engraving of the same inscription in
two or more different languages (of course neces-
sitated by making their decrees known to the
various peoples whom they ruled) was thus shown
to be a custom of the Persian kings.

Put upon the quest, a French schqlar, M. de
Sacy, born at Paris in 1758, copied sor^e inscrip-
tions of the Sassanid dynasty, which reigned in
Persia a.d. 226-651. These were written in a
known alphabet which is a mixture of Persian
and Aramaic, called Pehlevi, and were shown by
De Sacy to run in the following form : — " I, (M
or W,) king of kings, son of (X,) king of kings,
did thus and thus." Then, grouping together
the several facts, came Dr. Georg Friedrich
Grotefend, to formulate the theory that the Per-
sepolitan inscriptions were written in three lan-
guages, and not three alphabets of one language,
as Carsten Niebuhr had surmised. The recur-
rence of certain groups of characters led him to

CUNEIFORM WRITING. 85

the inference that " tlie inscriptions were a fixed
formula, only differing in the proper names. If
these inscriptions began, like those read by De
Sacy, with the formula, A', the king of kings, son of
D, the king of kings, then it was clear that D was
X's father ; and, further, that D's father was not
a king, because his name was not followed by
that title, D being therefore the founder of a
royal race. Now, Hystaspes, father of Darius,
was not king, but satrap under Cambyses ; and,
joining his knowledge of history to his skill in
philology, Grotefend found the key to the royal
name. He lived for thirty years after this dis-
covery, but added nothing to his triumph save "a
fortunate guess of the name Nebuchadnezzar in
one of the Assyrian inscriptions." Other de-
cipherments followed; but it was reserved for the
genius and industry of an Englishman, the late
Sir Henry Rawlinson, to discover the key where-
by the ancient languages of Persia, Babylon, and
Assyria can be read, and thus " a chapter of the
world's history that had been well-nigh wholly
lost made Hcnown to mankind." That eminent
scholar in no wise exaggerated the importance
of his work in claiming that its value in the inter-
pretation of cuneiform writing is almost equal to
that of the discovery of the Rosetta Stone in the
interpretation of the hieroglyphic texts of Egypt
[Archaologia, xxxiv. p. 75).

The story of Rawlinson's achievement is war-
rant of the claim. About sixty years ago, being
then a lieutenant, he was sent to Persia to drill
the army of the Shah. His interest in Oriental
history and antiquities was already keen, and he
was glad to find himself in regions rich in mate-
rials the obscurity of whose meaning quickened

THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

inquiry. Among these was a trilingual inscrip-
tion, dating from the early part of the sixth cen-
tury B.C., cut on the face of a bare precipitous
rock at Behistun, about twenty miles from Kir-
manshah, a district abounding in monuments of
the past (Fig. 39). At the risk of life and limb
he climbed the face of the steep cliff to make

Fig. 39. — Rock inscription at Behistun.

copies of such portions of the inscriptions as were
accessible with the means at his command, and
after a series of efforts, continued at intervals
through several years, he finally secured a com-
plete transcript of so much of the writing as time

CUNEIFORM WRITING. 87

had left uninjured. The inscription is in three
languages — Babylonian, Mede or Scythian, and
Persian — arranged in parallel columns containing
above one thousand lines. It commemorates
" the life and acts of Darius Hystaspes, his con-
quests, and the nations under his sway." Bas-
reliefs portray that monarch, bow in hand, sitting
with his feet on the prostrate usurper, Gaumates,
while a train of nme rebel princes, whose names
are inscribed above their effigies, stand before
the " king of kings," chained together by the
neck. Two of the monarch's soldiers are in the
rear. Over Gaumates is written : " This is Gau-
mates, the Magian ; he lied ; he said, I am Smer-
dis, son of Cyrus." The same formula occurs
over the heads of each of the nine captives.
"This is (M) ; he lied; he said he was king of
(N)." The inscription begins with a solemn in-
vocation to Ormuzd, the old Persian god of light
and purity, and passes on to detail the claim of
Darius to the throne of the Achaemenids and the
possessions of the Persian crown. It tells of the
defeat of Smerdis, and of the revolt of Susiana, a
province lying between Persia and Babylonia.
" I sent thither an army, and the rebel Atrina
was brought in chains before me ; I slew him."
The same story is narrated concerning other re-
bellious subjects. Of one Phraortes, it is told
that his nose, ears, and tongue were cut off, and
that he was " crucified at Ecbatana, together with
his accomplices." Then the inscription proceeds :

" King Darius saith : These countries rebelled against
my power. By lies they were separated from me. The men
thou seest here deceived my people. My army took them,
according to my orders. King Darius saith : Oh, thou that
shall be king hereafter, see that thou art not guilty of deceit.

88 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

Him that is wicked, judge as he should be judged, and if thou
reignest thus thy kingdom will be great. King Darius saith :
What I did, I did ever by the grace of Ormuzd Thou that
readest upon this stone my deeds, think not that thou hast been
deceived, neither be thou slow to believe them. King Darius
saith : Ormuzd be my witness that I have not spoken these
things with lying lips." (Cf. Transactions of Royal Asiatic
Society, 1844-46, 1851 ; also Life of Sir Henry Rawlinson,
pp. 146, 153, 326.)

As Professor Mahaffy points out, the exact
correspondence of this record, "especially in the
many proper names it contains, with the names of
persons and provinces described by Herodotus, is
a convincing proof of the accuracy of the deci-
phering. It will give some notion of the style of
the documents that have been preserved. It will
also prove the accuracy of the accounts given by
Herodotus and Xenophon of the character of the
ancient Persians, in whom an honest love of truth
and hatred of lies was the prominent feature — a
feature which we justly honour more than any
other in a nation, but in which most Oriental na-
tions, and indeed the Greeks also, were wofully
deficient." {^Prolegomena, p. 186.)

Sir Henry Rawlinson's decipherment of the
great inscription of Behistun did perhaps more
than aught else to open the long-closed door to
the secret of Mesopotamian culture. The Persian
inscription is in a language which is the mother-
tongue of modern Persian, and its meaning being
discovered, the interpretation of the Medic or
Scythic, and of the Babylonian, the oldest of the
three, followed, while the several characters sup-
plied a valuable object-lesson in the stages of
the development of writing from the ideographic
through the syllabic, and thence of approach to
the alphabetic.

CUNEIFORM WRITING. 89

Cuneiform writing appears to have been origi-
nally inscribed upon a vegetable substance called
likhusi, but the abundant clay of the alluvial
country afforded material whose convenience and
permanence brought it into general use. Upon
this the characters were impressed by a reed or
square-shaped stylus, the clay-books being after-
wards baked or sun-dried. For inscriptions on
stone or metal a chisel was used. The writing of
the Assyrian scribes is often exceedingly minute,
the tablets containing a mass of matter in a tiny
space. The work was trying enough to some-
times require the use of a magnifying-glass, and
among Sir Austin Layard's discoveries at Nineveh
was that of a lathe-turned crystal lens, which was
probably used for the purpose. Obviously the
substances chosen account for the angular form
of the characters ; as the dyer's hand is " subdued
to what it works in," so the nature of the mate-
rial in which the sculptor seeks to express his
conceptions largely determines for him the limits
of that expression. Phidias himself could not
have produced his Pallas Athene from the stub-
born granite of Syene ; and, as the outcome of the
Egyptian temperament, the sphinxes of the Nile
valley might have worn a less relentless look had
they been fashioned of the marble of Pentelicus.
Much as the abrupt cuneiform character tends,
however, to obscure the traces of its derivation,
there are sufficing proofs that it is of pictographic
origin, although no examples of picture-writing in
Mesopotamia corresponding in primitiveness to
those already given from barbaric sources have
been discovered. In the linear Babylonian, as it
is called, the hieroglyph for " sun " is a diamond-
shaped figure ^ which later on became ^^ , and

90 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

in the latest cuneiform, ^T. Evidently the ear-
liest sign was a circle, which could not be easily
traced on the stone or clay, and hence appears
as the angular character shown above. The an-
ne.ved table, which is a copy of one supplied by
Mr. Pinches to Professor Keane, and published in
his admirable monograph, Ma/i Pasf and Present,
gives a set of typical examples of the derivation
of cuneiform characters from the earliest known
pictographs.

As an illustration bearing upon the specimens
set forth in the table we have the ideogram of

Nineveh ^^^^ <T. The archaic form of this char-
acter ^~^['S<r1 I proves that it was compounded

of the ideographic picture of a house, enclosing
the ideogram of the fish Vj^-,, thus preserving
record of the mstructive fact that imperial Nine-
veh was at first, as its name implies [nun, " fish,"
is the name of the fourteenth letter of the Semitic
alphabet), a collection of fishermen's huts (c/.
Taylor, i. 41). The frequent mixture of old and
new forms in cuneiform writing, and the different
values sometimes given to the same sign, have
increased the difficult task of interpretation. As
in the earlier stages of other languages, determi-
natives were used; e.g. all names of men were
preceded by a single upright wedge, of countries
by three horizontal wedges, and so on. But in
the examples given in the table, the gradual con-
ventionalising of the signs is seen, as in that for
"ox," wherein the modification of the head and
horns of the animal into the phonogram is ob-
vious, while the Behistun inscription exhibits well-

CUNEIFORM WRITING.

defined stages of approach to simplification. The
Cumbrous cuneiform which fills the third column

Evolution of the Akkadian Cuneiforms.

1000 B.C.

Aboul 2500

Oldest known line formj

and laler.

to 1500 B.C.

3000 B.C

and earlier.

•M

"bird."

lil

~r-

"sheep" (pro-
bably a shee»'
'old).

tT4

"ox."

c=l

" to go,"
" to stand.^

—

"hand."

ISI^^

^ f^Js^

'•man."

-><3>

"dagger."

SL<

'!<

—

"fish."

l-u

-m^

•-

iv^

"reed."

—

iv^

"reed."

:®>. :^»

»»

"com" ("ear.
of com ")•

—

"god,"
♦' heaven."

«;►+.

il^^

" constellation,"
"star."

has five hundred symbols, ideograms, phono-
grams, and homophones; the Medic, which occu-
pies the second column, is written in ninety-six
pure syllabic signs; while the Persian tells the
same story in thirty-six alphabetic signs, four only

92 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

of the primitive ideograms being retained. This
survival of use of ideograms, it may be noticed in
passing, has illustration among ourselves in many
ways. As certain parts of the body, e.g. hand,
foot, bosom (in Anglo-Sa.\on/ci'///^w, i.e. " fathom,"
or the space of both arms e.xtended), and forearm
(Latin ulna, Anglo-Saxon elti, whence "ell"), be-
came and remain standards of measurement, so it
is with certain modes of reckoning. The digits,
I, II, in, nil (Latin digitus, "a finger") are unques-
tionably pictures of fingers, and Grotefend con-
tends with good reason that v is a picture of the
four fingers closed and the thumb extended, while
X would represent the two hands, iv the subtrac-
tion and VI the addition of a finger. The use of
a primitive decimal notation is wide-spread among
barbaric peoples. In chess problems the several
pieces are pictorially represented ; in the plane-
tary signs, ^ is the caduceus or wand of Mer-
cury; ? is the mirror of Venus, while the ento-
mologist, in cataloguing his specimens, uses these
symbols for the male and female respectively. In
i we have the shield and spear of Mars; in H,
the sign for Jupiter, the arm wields a thunderbolt ;
and the mower's scythe^ is the symbol of Saturn
(connected with Latin sero, satum, "to sow "), the
god of agriculture. The signs of the Zodiac,
which were mapped out by the old Chaldeans,
supply a still more cogent example. In the form
in which they are depicted on the ancient temple
of Denderah, in Egypt, there may be traced evi-
dence of their primitive pictorial character, a char-
acter still recognised in the headings of the
months in our almanacks (cf. IVhiiaker's), and to
be detected in current symbols. For example,
the curved horns of the ram survive in T, the

CUNEIFORM WRITING. 93

sign for Aries; the head and horns of the bull in
y , the sign of Taurus; the arrow and a portion
of the bow in +*., the sign for Sagittarius; while,
as Dr. Taylor points out, " the curious symbol V3
is found to preserve the whole outline of Capri-
cornus, the small circle being the head of the goat,
with the forelegs below, and the body and tail
extending to the left." Then in such entries in
the almanack as"0 rises 4h. 25m.," " T)iih. 54m.,"
" ® loth 9.32 morn.," " 71 3420 " in tables of the
configuration of Jupiter's satellites, as also in the
symbols for money, weights, measures, and so
forth, the not wholly dispensed with picture-writ-
ing may be detected. The well-nigh vanished
trade signs doubtless served a useful purpose as
pictographs in guiding the illiterate to the shops
of which they were in quest ; and here and there
the barber's pole with its spiral bandages reminds
us of the phlebotomy of the past ; the golden
balls of the great financiers of Florence hang out
from pawnbrokers' shops their delusive signal to
the thriftless ; while the " grasshopper " of Messrs.
Martin, the " leather bottell " of Messrs. Hoare,
and other remnants of goldsmiths' trade signs,
remind us how many of these swung before the
shops of Cheape and Lombard Street in olden
time.

To return to the cuneiform. It will be remem-
bered that in the case of the ino7iosyUabic Chinese,
with its dictionary of forty thousand words, the
symbols of these are compounds of phonograms
or sound-words with determinatives as keys to
the precise meaning to be attached to the phono-
grams. Now the languages of the ancient peo-
ples of the Euphrates valley are polysyllabic, and
hence arose the necessity for signs denoting full

94 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

syllables, both complex, " in which several conso-
nants may be distinguished, or simple syllables
composed of only one consonant and one vowel
or vice versa.'' (Maspero's Daivn of Civilization,
p. 728.) And among the libraries of Babylon
there were discovered a number of little gram-
matical documents on bricks, called syllaharia,
where a list of characters is given, with the pho-
netic sign explained in simple syllables at one
side, and, when used ideographically, at the
other. When a syllabary had thus been adopted,
the grouping into words was effected by combin-
ing the syllables. '' But a polysyllabic language
did not lend itself so readily as the Chinese mono-
syllabic to syllabism," and Halevy explains how
the difficulty was met. It w^as met, at least in
some degree, by the adoption of the principle of
Aerology (Greek akron, " extreme " = at the top
or start), i. e. by the choice of a name from the
likeness which it suggested between the form of
the letter and some familiar thing whose name
began with the letter in question. This re-naming
of letters by a word beginning with them occurred
in the Egyptian, Russian, Runic, and other alpha-
bets. For example, in Russian, the letter b is not
called beta but buki, " a beech," while d has lost
the old name of delta and acquired that of dobro,
"an oak." In the Hunic letters of our forefathers
b is named beorc or " birch," and th " thorn," while
the acrologic system comes nearer home to us in
the old nursery rhymes: "A was an Archer, who
shot at a frog; B was a Butcher, who had a big
dog," &c.

Now this advance to syllabism had been ef-
fected, long before the Babylonians appear on
ihe scene, by the older inhabitants of Mesopo-

CUNEIFORM WRITING. 95

tamia, the Akkadians, or, more correctly, the
Akkado-Sumerians, the Akkadians being settled
on the highlands, and the Sumerians on the plains,
of that region. The racial affinities of either are
not determined, some ethnologists holding that
they are of Finno-Turkic origin, others that they
belong to the Tatar-Mongolic branch. Neither
is it known at what period they immigrated into
Chaldea, since at the dawn of history they are
already merged in the Semitic conquering race.
Some thousands of years b.c. Chaldea had been
invaded by the people afterwards known as Baby-
lonians, whose primitive home, in common with
that of other Semites, as the Hebrews, Phoeni-
cians, (Sec, is conjectured to have been in South
Arabia. The Babylonians, mixing their blood
with that of the subject peoples, settled as agri-
culturists on the rich alluvial lowlands, while an
offshoot from them, the Assyrians, occupied the
mountainous and wooded country to the north of
the great rivers, keeping their Semitic purity of
descent. These " Romans of the East," as they
have been called, were soldiers and merchants,
strong in the conviction that "trade follows the
flag," and hence embarking in many an aggressive
enterprise to beat the Phoenician and other rivals
in commerce. But, resting on the sword alone,
the Assyrian empire perished by the sword.

As for the Akkadians (using this term to in-
clude the pre-Semite inhabitants), they had passed
the barbaric stage when they invaded Chaldea.
They knew the use of metals: they were skilful
architects, and, what was of importance in the
marshy districts where dams and canals were
indispensable, good engineers; their laws mark
an advanced social organisation ; their writing,
7

96 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

as has been seen, had become syllabic ; and their
literature, besides recording the details of their
daily life, supplies the key to a religion which pro-
foundly influenced the Babylonians, and, through
them, the Hebrews, ultimately affecting the whole
of Christendom. That religion was a blend of
higher and lower ideas. At base it was Shaman-
istic. Natural phenomena — sun, moon, stars, the
earth, and so forth — were worshipped, but, as in
all religions, that which touches man more closely
in his affairs and relations has the firmer hold, and
hence there was an active belief in magic, with its
allied apparatus of charms, spells, and incanta-
tions. Side by side with formulae embodying
superstitions common to barbaric folk all the
world over, we find penitential psalms, appeals
to the great gods, and spiritual utterances, some
of which are on a plane with Hebrew sacred
poetry. All this body of literature, secular and
sacred, made up the vast store of books in the
libraries whose interpretation is one of the bril-
liant successes of modern scholarship, and whose
contents bring home to us the priceless value of
the art of writing to mankind.

Up to a recent date, the oldest known exam-
ple of cuneiform writing was supplied by a por-
phyry cylinder seal of the Semite king, Sargon I.,
who flourished 3800 B.C. (Fig. 40). It bears this
inscription : — " Sargon, King of the city of Akkad,
to the Sun-god (Sarnas) in the city of Sippara I
approached." It is this same king concerning
whom a myth, which may have been the origin cf
the myth about the infant Moses in the bulrushes,
is recorded on a tablet preserved, together with
the seal, in the British Museum.

Another famous cuneiform relic is the Stele of

CUNEIFORM WRITING. 97

the Vultures, a large portion of which is in the
Louvre. It dates from about 4500 b.c, and be-

FiG. 40. — Cylinder seal of Sargon 1.

sides its sculptured panels, one of which depicts
vultures carrying away the heads of the slain in

98 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

battle (whence its name), it records the victory
of E-anna-du, priest-king of Sirpurra, over the
" people of the land of the Bow," on the Elamite
frontier, a tribute of corn being imposed on the
conquered state. Other inscriptions testify that
"in the fourth millennium before the Christian
era art was fully developed, statues set up, the
chariot used in war, silver and copper worked,
weaving and the making of pottery known, and
an elaborate system of calculation into thousands
evolved." But the antiquity of these witnesses
pales before that evidenced by the rubbish-mounds
of the city of Nuffar or Nippur, in Northern
Babylonia. Several records of Sargon I. were
found among the thousands of tablets dug from
the later deposits, but discoveries were made be-
neath these on which Dr. Peters, in reporting on
the epigraphic material secured by Mr. Haynes,
writes as follows: — "We found that Nippur was
a great and flourishing city, and its temple, the
temple of Bel, the religious centre of the domi-
nant people of the world at a period as much
prior to the time of Abraham as the time of
Abraham is prior to our own day. We discov-
ered written records no less than six thousand
years old, and proved that writing and civilisation
were then by no means in their infancy. Further
than that, our explorations have shown that Nip-
pur possessed a history extending backward of
the earliest written documents found by us, at
least two thousand years." {Nippur ; the Narra-
tive of the University of Pennsylvania's Expedition,
vol. ii. p. 241.) Upon which Dr. Hilprecht com-
ments: "I do not hesitate to date the founding
of the temple of Bel and the first settlements in
Nippur somewhere between 6000 and 7000 B.C.,

CUNEIFORM WRITING.

and possibly earlier." {A cade f /ly, ^oth April 1898,

P- 465-)

Although they are nearly five thousand years
later, deeper interest attaches to the three hundred

and twenty clay tablets, inscribed with the cunei-
form character (Fig. 41), which were discovered
in 1887 among the ruins of Tell-el-Amarna, the
Arabic name of a village on the east bank of the

lOO THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

Nile, about one hundred and eighty miles south
of the once renowned city of Memphis. The vil-
lage stands on the site of a city founded by Ame-
nophis 111., so that the date of the documents,
among which are letters received by that knig, is
known to range from 1500 to 1450 B.C. Two of
the tablets contain legends, and one gives a hymn

Fig. 42. — First creation tablet.

to the war-god, but the larger number comprise
communications passing between the kings of
Egypt and the kings of Western Asia, many of
them being docketed with the date and name of
the sender w^ritten in Egyptian hieroglyph. One
tablet from a Hittite prince is written in the old
Akkadian tongue. They furnish valuable informa-
tion upon the political and commercial relations
between Egypt and Babylonia, and upon negotia-
tions between the kings both for wives and sub-
sidies. " Being all in the cuneiform character,
they were unlikely to be readily deciphered at the
Egyptian court. Hence it was the custom of the

I02 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

Babylonian kings to send interpreters with them,
and reference is made to such messengers in sev-
eral of the letters. But a scribe able to read and
write the cuneiform was undoubtedly kept by the
Pharaohs for purposes of translation and for indit-
ing replies. Some of the tablets are copies of
such replies, written in cuneiform, but retained
for reference, just as we in the present day keep
copies of important letters."

The actual contents of the Tell-el-Amarna
tablets are of secondary importance to the fact
that cuneiform writing was in use in Palestine fif-
teen hundred years before Christ, and, therefore,
that Babylonian myths and legends had, in all
probability, circulated freely there centuries be-
fore the Book of Genesis took shape. Thus the
legends of the Creation, the Fall, and the Deluge,
the Chaldean origin of which is established (Figs.
42, 43, 44), " can very well have existed in Pales-
tine at the time it was invaded by the Israelites,
who would have learned them from the people
they subdued, and would have found plenty of
time to modify them into the forms in which they
appear in Hebrew literature." {^The Witness of
Assyria^ p. 11, by Chilperic Edwards.)

CHAPTER VI.

EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPHICS.

With the foregoing references to some of the
most venerable documents that have yet come to
light, we may leave Assyria for Egypt, no longer a
land of marvel and of mystery, with its past hidden

EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPHICS. 103

as the sources of the great river of which that
land is "the gift" were long hidden. For the
discovery of the key to that past, and of the vast
waters that feed the Nile, alike lie within the
present century. Till then the veil of Isis hung
over the significance of the inscriptions on coffin,
sepulchral box, stele, tomb, obelisk, and temple,
and over the interpretation of characters written
on papyri rolls centuries before the foundations of
Athens were laid. Of these records, be it noted.
Death, which sweeps away man and the memory
of him from his fellows, has been more than aught
else — in Egypt, and indeed, all the world over,
but notably in Egypt — the preserver. And this
because there all that appertained to the departed
was guarded with the most jealous care. The
tomb, as often elsewhere, was modelled on the
plan, of the house, and supplied with utensils, food,
and drink, or adorned with the painted represen-
tations of these things on the walls, for the needs
of the ka, or double, sahti, or spirit, or some other
of the eight Egyptian ontological divisions of the
individual.

Like the other pictographic systems already
surveyed, the Egyptian interests us because it
has preserved the traces of its origin, adding its
" cloud of witnesses" to the identity of the sev-
eral stages of development marking the scripts of
all literate peoples. Until very recently, its chief
interest lay in the belief that it is the parent of
the family of alphabets of the civilised world ;
but, as will be shown later on, the theory is no
longer tenable. Although the earliest known ex-
amples of Egyptian hieroglyphs (Greek hieros,
" sacred," and glypho, " to carve," so-called in the
belief that they were used solely by the priests)

I04 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

contain alphabetic characters, they have come
down as highly elaborated types of picture-writ-
ing, the changes in which during the long period
covered by the records being so slight that, to
cite Professor Whitney, " it is like a language
which has never forgotten the derivations of its
words, or corrupted their etymological form, how-
ever much it may have altered its meaning."
Therefore, although the Egyptians had developed
alphabet-signs five thousand years B.C. they never
advanced to the stage of their sole and independ-
ent use, partly because of the conservative in-
stincts of the race which, fostering veneration for
the old, was reluctant to alter anything, and partly
because, as Professor Flinders Petrie has pointed
out, their " treatment of everything was essentially
decorative, the love of form and drawing being
in Egypt a greater force than amongst any other
ancient people. Babylon and China, from want
of sufificient artistic taste, allowed their pictorial
writing to sink into a mere string of debased and
conventional forms; the Egyptians, on the con-
trary, preserved the purely pictorial and artistic
character of their hieroglyphs to the end. The
hieroglyphs were a decoration in themselves ; their
very position in the sentence was subordinate to
the decorative effect. The Egyptian could not
be guilty of the barbarism seen on some of the
Assyrian sculpture, where inscriptions were
scrawled right across the work without regard to
design. So far was this idea carried that many
words or ideas were represented by two distinct
characters, one wide and the other narrow and
deep, so that the harmony of the design should
not be broken by an unsuitable element. The re-
sult was that the Egyptians were rewarded by

EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPHICS. 1 05

having the most beautiful writing in the world."
(^Egyptian Decorative Art, p. 4.)

This writing exists in three groups of charac-
ters (Fig. 45) : {a) Hieroglyphic, {b) Hieratic, {c)
Demotic. The demotic is derived
from the hieratic, and the hieratic ^ ^ C
from the hieroglyphic. ^ ^^^ ^^

{a) Pictogram, ideogram, and Fig. 45. — Hiero-
phonogram — in other words, signs ^^^Pl"*^' ^.'^'■^'^'^•

^ ° ^ 1-11 and demotic signs

representative of word, idea, and formahr
sound — make up the seventeen
hundred hieroglyphs which, in the older signs, pre-
serve the traces of their origin in rude picture-
writing. They were chiselled on stone of various
kinds, cut or painted on wood or plaster, and
written on papyrus or skin ; the characters being
arranged in vertical columns.

With the quickened zeal of modern excavators
discoveries come apace, so that before these
words are printed, some additional find, throwing
all others into the shade, may come to light.
Such, for example, would be the production of
epigraphic evidence as to the sojourn and op-
pression of the Israelites in Egypt, and their escape
from that "house of bondage." For a long time
the earliest known example of hieroglyphic writ-
ing which the Gizeh and Ashmodean Museums
could show (each institution possessing fragments
of the relic) was a mutilated stele or monumental
tablet to the memory of Shera, a priest or grand-
son of Sent, the fifth king of the Second Dynasty,
which, adopting Professor Flinders Petrie's chro-
nology, flourished about four thousand five hun-
dred years b.c. In this record three alphabetic
characters are employed to spell that monarch's
name. But in November 1897, Dr. Borchardt

Io6 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET,

reported the important discovery that the royal
tomb found by M. de Morgan in the spring of that
year at Nagada, situate opposite Coptos, a little
north of Thebes, is that of Menes, the founder of
the First Dynasty, whose date Professor Flinders
Petrie fixes at 4777 b.c, "with a possible error
of a century." Calcined remains of the body are
now in the Gizeh Museum, and, among other
objects, the broken fragments of an ivory plaque
which, when joined, showed the ka name of Aha
(the ka being the "double" or "other self " of
the deceased which abode with the mummy), and,
attached thereto, the name MN = Menes, borne
by the Pharaoh during his lifetime. Assuming
that Dr. Borchardt's interpretation is accepted by
Egyptologists, it proves that the hieroglyphic
system of writing was then already fully devel-
oped. It may be remarked, incidentally, that
among the remains of the predynastic race dis-
covered by Professor Flinders Petrie in 1895, in
the district north of Thebes, no hieroglyphs or
traces of other writing were found. There was
evidence of knowledge of metals, but not of the
potter's wheel. It therefore seems probable that
writing came in with the First Dynasty, which,
according to M. de Morgan, was descended from
Chaldean Semites.

But more interesting, for the light thrown on
early Egyptian thought, than inscriptions on steel
or plaque are the copies of portions of the sacred
literature entitled " Chapters of the Coming Forth
by Day," and also the " Chapters of Making Strong
the Beatified Spirit," but commonly known as the
Book of the Dead. This venerable embodiment
of human conceptions about an after life, and of
human hope and consolation this side the grave,

EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPHICS. 1 07

contains the hymns, prayers, and magic formulae
against all opposing foes and evil spirits, to be
recited by the dead Osiris (the soul was conceived
to have such affinity with the god Osiris as to be
called by his name) in his journey to Amenti, the
underworld that led ro the Fields of the Blessed.
It lies outside both our scope and space to give
an account of the contents of the several chap-
ters, and, fortunately, the entire text, translated
by Dr. Wallis Budge, with admirable facsimiles
of illustrations, is within the reach of a moderate
purse. But one curious and prominent feature
should have reference, because it shows the per-
sistence of barbaric ideas about names as integral
parts of things. (On this subject, see the author's
Totn Tit Tot ; an Essay o?i Savage Philosophy in
Folk- Tale, 1898.) The Osiris has not only to be
able to recite the names and titles of the gods,
but of every part of the boat, " from truck to
keel," as the nautical phrase goes, in which he
desires to cross the great river flowing to Amenti.
And then, before he can enter the Hall of the
Two Truths — that is, of Truth and Justice, where
the god Osiris and the forty-two judges of the
dead are seated — the jackal-headed Anubis re-
quires him to tell the names of every part of the
doors, posts, and woodwork generally. These
correctly given, the soul declares its innocence in
language whose moral tone has never been sur-
passed, while it throws a light on the virtues and
vices of old Egyptian society which makes clear
how poor a guide to the past are its monuments
compared with its literature.

The age of the composition of this remarkable
book is unknown. But so old is it that the earliest
copies we possess show that when they were

Io8 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

made, some six thousand years ago, the exact
meaning of parts of the text had become obscure
to the transcribers. Fragments of it have been
found in those ancient tombs, the Pyramids;
chapters or long extracts were written on stone
and wooden cofifins; but after the expulsion of
the Hyksos, or Shepherd Dynasty, by the kings
of Thebes, about 1580 b. c, papyrus came more
into use for the purpose.

One of the most superbly-illustrated examples
is that known as the Papyrus of A?ii, belonging
to what is called the Theban recension of the
text, which was much used from the Eighteenth
to the Twentieth Dynasty (1587-1060 b.c). It
will suffice, as evidence of the magical qualities
attributed to the written word, to quote the fol-
lowing from the seventy-second chapter, as trans-
lated into sonorous English by Dr. Wallis Budge:

" If this writing be known (by the deceased) upon earth,
and this chapter be done into writing upon (his) coffin, he
shall come forth by day in all the forms of existence which he
desireth, and he shall enter into (his) place, and be not re-
jected. Bread and ale and meat shall be given unto Osiris,
the scribe Ani upon the altar of Osiris . . . there shall wheat
and barley be given unto him ; there shall he flourish as he did
upon earth, and he shall do whatsoever pleaseth him, even as
do the gods who are in the undervvorld, for everlasting mil-
lions of ages, world without end."

Under Dr. Wallis Budge's editorship, the Ani
papyrus has recently been supplemented by the
issue of facsimiles and translations of papyri and
other texts connected with the Book of the Dead.
Among these is a Book of Breathings, written in a
late hieratic, and dating from late pre-Chris-
tian times. It contains a ritual to be said by the
priest for or over the dead, and teaches belief in

EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPHICS. 109

a resurrection of the body and a state of material
bliss on earth. " Thy soul shall live," and, so
runs the text, " thy corruptible body shall burst
into life, and thou shalt never decay." . . . "Grant
that his soul may go into every place whereso-
ever it would be, and let him live upon earth for
ever and ever."

Up to a point the story of Egyptian writing
illustrates the stages of development of writing
generally so clearly that its recital, even at the
cost of some repetition, will be helpful, and the
more so as it falls into line with the story of
other scripts.

" It goes without saying " that the representa-
tion of an object was a simple matter enough, the
rudest draughtsmanship sufficing for a picture
that should tell its own meaning at a glance.
But as soon as the need arose to graphically ex-
press ideas, for example, such as vice and virtue,
time and space, health and sickness, symbolism
came in. To the illustrations of this supplied by
the scripts already dealt with may be added a
few examples from Egyptian ideography, into
which, at the stage that we first meet it, the whole
system of hieroglyphics may be said to have be-
come modified. The bee was a symbol of kinship
and also of industry ; a roll of papyrus denoted
knowledge; an ostrich feather, justice, because
these feathers were supposed to be of equal
length ; a palm branch, one year, because that
tree was popularly believed to put forth a fresh
branch every new moon — although, as Mr. Glid-
don suggests, a more plausible reason is in the
annual cutting of the lower leaves close to the
trunk. The ideograph for a priest was a jackal
— not, as may be cynically hinted, because of his

no THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

"devouring widows' houses," but because of his
watchfulness ; for a mother, a vulture, because
that bird was believed to nourish its young w-ith
its own blood. Thirst w^as represented by a calf
running towards water; power by a brandished
whip ; and battle by two arms, the one holding a
shield and the other a javelin. Among the Da-
kotah Indians combat is indicated by two arms
pointed at each other. The ideograph for night,
a star pendant from a curve, is like the Ojibwa ;
•while among the ancient Mexicans night was rep-
resented by a semicircle with eyes, as stars, at-
tached to it. Signs for hunger, thirst, supplica-

J t

Night Night Supplication Supplication Negation

(Egyptian). (Maya). (Egy-ptian). (Ojibwa). (Eg>-ptian).

Negation Negation Medicine man God of Medicine

(California Indian). (Maya). (Ojibwa). (Easter Island).

Fig. 46. — Comparative ideographs.

tion, and so forth, among both Innuit Indian
and ancient Egyptian — as indeed many other
signs among peoples, both in the old world and
the new, whose writing has not reached a purely
phonetic stage — have that correspondence to be
expected when things common to all men are
graphically represented (Fig. 46). Running water,
for example, remains necessarily a pictograph, but
water depicted in connection with rites represents,
by one symbol or another, the varying nature of

EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPHICS. Ill

the latter. Both in Egypt and Mexico it is repre-
sented flowing from a vessel, the Egyptian ideo-
graph having a kneeling figure with arms up-
lifted, as if in adoration or gratitude. There
appears, also, some resemblance between the sym-
bol for negation between these two, but this has
the doubt attaching to all metaphysical interpreta/-
tion of signs.

Obviously, this presentment of ideas through
graphic designs into which metaphor often bor-
dering on enigma had to be read, implied good
memories and clear grasp of association on the
part of the interpreter. Any doubt or ambiguity,
with resulting confusion, as to the meaning of
the symbol, rendered it worse than useless. Hence
the addition of "determinants," concerning which
something was said when treating of the Chinese
script (see p. 77). These are of two classes — the
special and more numerous, whose use was con-
fined to one word or idea; and the general, num-
bering about two hundred, which, like the Chinese
" keys," refer to whole groups of words.

But ideas have to be arranged in sentences,
and these are made up of nouns, adjectives, verbs,
and other parts of speech for which symbolism,
however ingenious, can make no provision. More-
over, while the characters are limited in their
application, the ideas to be expressed graphically
are ever growing, and hence, in course of time,
there are not enough symbols "to go round." A
way of escape opened itself, and thereby led to
an invention undreamed of, when recourse was
had to the use of pictures of things which were
different in sense, but the names of which had
the same sound j in other words, to the pictorial
pun known as the rebus (see p. 72). As an amus-
8

112 " THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

ing instance of the formation of a compound
phonogram out of syllabic signs, Canon Taylor
quotes from an inscription of Ptolemy XV. at
Edfu, in which, as he says, " it seems not impos-
sible to detect a faint flavour of ancient Egyptian
humour. The name of lapis lazuli was khcsteb.
Now the word khesf meant ' to stop,' and the syl-
lable teb, ' a pig.' Hence the rebus ' stop-pig '
was invented to express graphically the name of
laj>is lazuli, which is figured by the picture of a
man stopping a pig by pulling at its tail." Prob-
ably the Canon is right, but in western lands that
action is often intended to make the pig move
on. Another example of the rebus occurs in the
name of Osiris, which in Egyptian is Hcsiri
(Wallis Budge gives it as Ausir). The god, on
this showing, is represented, presumably, by a
figure on a seat, lies, and by an eye, iri. But
with the constant revision of interpretations by
Egyptologists, it behoves us to quote with cau-
tion. There is a stock illustration as to the adop-
tion of the supposed picture of a lute (used by
the Egyptian scribes to denote " excellence ") as
a phonogram to express the word fie/er, " good."
But it seems that what was thought to be a lute
is the picture of a heart and windpipe !

At last, we know not when, and we cannot,
speaking of Egypt alone, guess where, there
dawned upon some mind the fact that all the
words which men uttered are expressed by a few
sounds. Hence, what better plan than to select
from the big and confused mass of ideograms,
phonograms, and all their kin, a certain number
of signs to denote, unvaryingly, certain sounds ?

That was the birth of the Alphabet, one of
the greatest and most momentous triumphs of the

EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPHICS. 113

human mind. The earliest phonograms repre-
sented syllables, not individual letters, the distin-
guishing signs for vowels and consonants being
of yet later introduction ; in fact, some alpha-
bets, notably the Hebrew and other Semitic, have
no true vowels, but only distinguishing marks,
diacritical points as they are called, to denote
them. To recapitulate, we have i, picture-writ-
ing; 2, ideograms; 3, phonograms representing
words; 4, phonograms representing syllables; 5,
alphabetic characters. From their four hundred
verbal phonograms and syllabic signs the Egyp-
tians of a remote age — for it is literally true " that
the letters of the alphabet are older than the Pyra-
mids " — appear to have selected at the outset
forty-five symbols for alphabetic use, but the rare
occurrence or special use of some of these caused
a further reduction to twenty-five letters. "All
that remained to be done was to take one simple
step — boldly to discard all the non-alphabetic ele-
ments, at once to sweep away the superfluous
lumber, rejecting all the ideograms, the homo-
phones, the polyphones, the syllabics, and the
symbolic signs to which the Egyptian scribes so
fondly clung, and so to leave revealed in its grand
simplicity the nearly perfect alphabet, of which,
without knowing it, the Egyptians had been vir-
tually m possession for almost countless ages."
(Taylor, i. 68.) That step they never took, but
continued the use of eye-pictures side by side with
that of ear-pictures, instead of passing to the use
of fixed signs for certain sounds.

{^) The cursive writing known as Hieratic was
an abridged and conventionalised form of the
hieroglyphic. The use of the latter became main-
ly restricted to monumental and kindred purposes,

114 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

while the hieratic was employed by the priests in
copying literary compositions, notable among
which was the Book of the Dead, papyrus being
the material most commonly used. This was
made from the byblus hieraticus or Cyperus papyruSy
a plant which flourished in the marshy districts of
the Nile. There it has long been extinct, and is
now found only in Sicily. It would seem to have
served as many useful purposes to the ancient
Egyptians as the bamboo serves to-day to the
Chinese and other Orientals. " The roots were
used for firewood, parts of the plant were eaten,
and other and coarser parts were made into paper,
boats, ropes, mats, &c." In preparing it for writ-
ing material, the outer rind was removed and the
pith then cut into strips, which were laid side by
side, with another set of strips across them fas-
tened by a thin solution of gum, thus forming a
sheet, which was pressed, dried in the sun, and
polished to a smooth surface. The sheets were
often joined to make a roll, which was sometimes
above one hundred feet long and varied in width
from six to seventeen inches. The finest papyri
of the "Book of the Dead" are about fifteen
inches wide, and, when they contain a tolerably
large number of chapters, are from eighty to nine-
ty feet long. Dipping his reed, which was either
bruised at the end to make it brush-like, or cut,
pen-like, to a point, in the ink-wells of his stone,
wooden, or sometimes ivory palette, which was
often dedicated to the god Thoth, " lord of divine
words," the professional scribe wrote the text in
varying colours, chiefly black or red, but also in
other tints imitative of the subject dealt with, as
blue for sky, yellow for woman, and so forth.
The earliest known specimen of hieratic writ-

EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPHICS. I15

ing is a papyrus containing chronicles of the
reign of King Asa, whose date, according to a
moderate estimate of Egyptian chronology, is
about 3580 B.C. To the same period the most
perfect literary work which has come down to us
is usually assigned, although the copy preserved
in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, whither it
was brought by M. Prisse d'Avennes from Thebes,
seems to have been written between 2700 and 2500
B.C. This valuable relic, commonly known after
its donor as the Papyrus Prisse, is entitled the
" Precepts of Ptah-Hetep," and its contents justify
the judgment of Dr. Wallis Budge, that "if all
other monuments of the great civilisation of
Egypt were wanting, it alone would show the
moral worth of the Egyptians, and the high ideals
of man's duties which they had formed nearly five
thousand five hundred years ago."

(^) The Demotic or Enchorial characters pre-
serve but slight traces of their derivation from
picture-writing. As the term hieratic (Greek
hieratikos, sacerdotal) denotes the class by whom
that writing was used, so the terms demotic (Greek
def/wtikos, of the people) and enchorial (Greek en-
chorios, of the country) denote that this writing
was in popular use, being adapted to the purposes
of daily life. It appears to have come into use
about 900 B.C., and so continued till the fourth
century of our era. It has been shown that in
the time of Darius and other rulers of the Achae-
mean dynasty, proclamations and documents of
general importance were set forth in three lan-
guages— Babylonian, Medic, and Persian. So, in
the time of the Ptolemies, who inherited the
Egyptian possessions of Alexander the Great and
ruled in the Nile Valley till it fell under the sway

Il6 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

of Rome, all matters of public importance were
made known in hieroglyphic, demotic, and Greek
characters. The hieroglyphic was called the
"writing of divine words"; the demotic, "writ-
ing of letters " ; and the Greek, " writing of the
Greeks."

CHAPTER VII.

THE ROSETTA STONE.

The expressions given above occur on the
famous Rosetta Stone, an inscribed slab of black
basalt, which has proved to be of priceless value
in supplying the key to the interpretation of
Egyptian hieroglyphs, thus fulfilling a purpose
corresponding to that of the Behistun rock in-
scriptions in the interpretation of cuneiform writ-
ing. The slab — which is preserved in the British
Museum — takes its name from its discovery among
the ruins of a fort near the Rosetta mouth of the
Nile, where it was found by a French ofificer in
1799. On the capitulation of Alexandria to the
British, the stone, whose importance had been
detected by the savants attached, by the foresight
of Napoleon, to his expedition, came by good
fortune under the charge of Sir William Hamil-
ton, whose interest in Egyptian antiquities was
keen. It is not perfect, but enough has survived
to suffice for decipherment of the general tenor
of the inscriptions. Speculation as to the mean-
ing of the hieroglyphs had been rife for centuries,
for although they remained in use one hundred
and fifty years after the Ptolemies began to reign
(305 B.C.), and although the names of Roman em-

THE ROSETTA STONE. ifj

perors were written in them as late as the third
century a.d., only a few among the classical
writers whose works we possess have anything of
value to say on the matter. It was not until the
early decades of the present century that the
ingenuity of two Egyptologists, Young and
Champollion, working independently (as, years
later, Adams and Leverrier worked at the prob-
lem of the discovery of Neptune), wrested their
secret from the hieroglyphs. Honour lies only in
lesser degree with some immediate predecessors,
among them Zoega, who rightly conjectured that
the oblong rings enclosed royal names, because
these " cartouches," as they are called, appeared
above the series of sitting figures in temple sculp-
tures ; and Akerblad, who published an alphabet
of the demotic characters on the Rosetta Stone.

Dr. Thomas Young was a very remarkable
man. Born of Quaker parents in 1773, he gave
his youth to literature, languages, and mechanics,
and at thirty won the Fellowship of the Royal
Society, having two years before then accepted
the Professorship of Natural Philosophy at the
Royal Institution. Made easy in circumstances
by a legacy from a relative, he applied himself
yet more strenuously to physics and philology.
The result of his labours in the one was the dis-
covery of the undulatory nature of light (which
has its analogy in sound-waves), in opposition to
Newton's corpuscular or emission theory ; and,
in the other, a partial decipherment of the de-
motic characters, and correct identification of the
names of a few of the Egyptian gods — Ra, Nut,
Thoth, Osiris, Isis, and Nephthys — and of the
names Ptolemy and Berenice. He died in 1829.

Jean Francois Champollion, of whom Dr. Wal-

Il8 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

lis Budge speaks as " the immortal discoverer of
a correct system of decipherment of Egyptian
hieroglyphics," was born in 1790. Like Young,
he betook himself early to the study of languages,
and at the age of thirteen was " master of a fair
knowledge of Hebrew, Syriac, and Chaldee." In
his twenty-second year he became Professor of
Ancient History to the Faculty of Letters at
Grenoble, and, w-ith a certain impulse to the quest
given by acquaintance with the labours of Young
and others, he revised their system and developed
his own, making tours to the museums of Turin,
Rome, and Naples for the study of papyri, and
passing thence to Egypt, where he secured a large
body of materials. Death overtook him in 1832,
but not before he had accomplished the chief aim
of his life in demonstrating that the hieroglyphic
characters are partly pictures of objects and
partly signs of sounds.

Although the Rosetta Stone was the base of
decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics, the suc-
cess following CharapoUion's labours is largely
due to the discovery of a small obelisk in the
island of Philse. This obelisk was said to have
been fixed in a socket bearing a Greek inscription
containing a petition of the priests of Isis at
Philas, addressed to Ptolemy, to Cleopatra his
sister, and to Cleopatra his wife. The hiero-
glyphic inscription upon the obelisk itself included
certain characters within a cartouche which were
identical with those within the only cartouche
occurring on the Rosetta Stone. Here, then,
was a clue, which was the more easily followed
up because the names of Ptolemy and Cleopatra
have, in the Greek, certain letters in common
which could be used for comparison with the

THE ROSETTA STONE. II9

hieroglyphics. " If the characters which are
similar in these two names express the same
sound in each cartouche, their purely phonetic
character is at once made clear," and the recov-
eryof the Egyptian alpha-
bet was only a question
of time (Figs. 47, 48, 49).
The Rosetta Stone is
inscribed with fragments
of fourteen lines of hieroglyphics, thirty-two lines
of demotic, and fifty-four Imes of Greek. These
have for their subject-matter a decree of the
priesthood assembled at Memphis in honour of
Ptolemy V. Epiphanes, King of Egypt, b.c. 195.

Fig. 47.— I'tolemy.

CaElZSSSH

Fig. 48. — Cleopatra,

They set forth the beneficent deeds of that mon-
arch, in his consecration of revenues of silver
and corn to the temples, his abolition of certain
taxes and reduction of others, his grant of privi-

KAISARS (CAESAR). A. Takrtr (autokrator).

Fig. 49.

leges to the priests and soldiers, and his under-
taking at his own cost, in the eighth year of his
reign, when the Nile rose to so great a height as
to flood all the plains, the task of damming it
and directing the overflow of its waters into
proper channels, to the great gain and benefit of
the agricultural classes. Besides his remission of

I20 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

taxes, he gave handsome gifts to the temples,
and subscribed to the various ceremonies con-
nected with public worship. In return for these
gracious acts, the priests assembled at Memphis
decreed that a statue of the king should be set
up in a conspicuous place in "every temple of
Egypt, and inscribed with the names and titles of
*' Ptolemy, the saviour of Egypt." Royal apparel
was to be placed on the statues, and ceremonies
"were to be performed before them three times a
day. It was also decreed that a gilded wooden
shrine, containing a gilded wooden statue of the
king, should be placed in each temple, and that
these were to be carried out with the shrines of
the other kings in the great panegyrics. It was
also decreed that ten golden crowns of a peculiar
design should be made and laid upon the royal
shrine ; that the birthday and coronation day of
the king should be celebrated each year with
great pomp and show ; that the first five days of
the month of Thoth should each year be set apart
for the performance of a festival in honour of
the king ; and, finally, that a copy of this decree,
engraved upon a tablet of hard stone in hiero-
glyphic, demotic, and Greek characters, should
be set up in each of the temples of the first, sec-
ond, and third orders, near the statue of the
ever-living Ptolemy. Dr. Wallis Budge adds that
" the Greek portion of the inscriptions appears to
be the original document, and the hieroglyphic
and demotic versions merely translations of it."
( T/ie Mummy, pp. no, in.)

As the principle of interpretation is the same
for all the inscriptions, and as the key to that
interpretation is knowledge of one of the lan-
guages in which the inscription occurs, brief ref-

EGYPTIAN WRITING. 12 I

erence to another historical tablet often bracketed
with the Rosetta Stone will suffice. This is known
as the Stele of Canopus, which also bears inscrip-
tions in hieroglyphic, demotic, and Greek. It is
about half a century earlier than the Rosetta
Stone, and was set up at Canopus in the ninth
year of the reign of Ptolemy III. to record a
decree made by the priesthood there assembled
in honour of the king. It recites acts similar in
their beneficent character to those recounted of
Ptolemy V., and decrees what honours shall be
paid him and his consort Berenice, whose famous
hair, dedicated in the temple of Arsinoe at Zephy-
rium in gratitude for Ptolemy's safe return from
his Syrian expedition, was said to have been
metamorphosed into the constellation known as
Coma Berenices.

CHAPTER VIII.

EGYPTIAN WRITING IN ITS RELATION TO
OTHER SCRIPTS.

The interpretation of the Egyptian hiero-
glyphics being thus settled once and for all, the
next problem to be attacked was their relation, if
any, to the sound-signs whence are derived the
alphabets of the civilised world. We travel back-
wards along clearly-marked lines from our alpha-
bet to the Roman, and thence to the Greek,
which tradition attributed to the Phoenicians.
Herodotus says upon this matter : " Now these
Phoenicians who came with Cadmos, of whom
were the Gephyraians, brought in among the Hel-
lenes many arts when they settled in this land of

122 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

Boeotia, and especially letters, which did not
exist, as it appears to me, among the Hellenes
before this time ; and at first they brought in
those which are used by the Phoenician race gen-
erally, but afterwards, as time went on, they
changed with their speech the form of the letters
also. Durmg this time the lonians were the race
of Hellenes who dwelt near them in most of the
places where they were; and these, having re-
ceived letters by instruction of the Phoenicians,
changed their form slightly and so made use of
them, and in doing so they declared them to be
called 'Phoenicians,' as was just, seeing that the
Phoenicians had introduced them into Hellas.
Also, the lonians from ancient time call paper
' skins,' because formerly, paper being scarce, they
used skins of goats and sheep; nay, even in my
own time many of the barbarians wrote on such
skins " (v. 58).

Pliny, in his Natural History (v. 12, 13), gives
the credit of the invention of the alphabet to the
Phoenicians, and other ancient authors repeat
what must have been an old tradition. The hon-
esty of these writers is unimpeachable, however
much their competency may be questioned; and
no slight confirmation of their testimony appears,
in the judgment of many modern scholars, to be
furnished by the correspondence in number, name
(the sibilants s and z excepted), and order, al-
though not in form, between the letters of the
Greek and the Semitic alphabets. " In default
of further evidence, the very word Alphabet,"
Canon Taylor remarks, " might suffice to disclose
the secret of its origin. It is obviously derived
from the names of the two letters alpha and beta,
which stand at the head of the Greek alphabet,

EGYPTIAN WRITING.

123

and which are plainly identical with the names
aleph and beth borne by the corresponding Semitic
characters. These names, which are meaningless
in Greek, are significant Semitic words, aleph de-
noting an ' ox,' and beth a ' house.' " The accom-
panying table shows the names and order of the
Greek and Semitic letters, the Hebrew being se-

HEBREW.

GREEK.

Name.

Meaning.

Name.

X Aleph

A a Alpha

3 Beth

house

B /3 6 Beta

J Gimel

camel

r 7 Gamma

n Daleth

door

A 5 Delta

n He

window

E € Epsilon

1 Vau

hook

(Vau— obsolete)

T Zayin

weapons

Z C Zeta

n Cheth

fence

H i\ Eta

13 Teth

serpent?

0 ,* fl Theta

> Yod

hand

I ( Iota

3 Kaph

palm of
hand

K K Kappa

p Lamed

ox-goad

A A. Lambda

0 Mem

waters

M ft. Mu

J Nun

fish

N v Nu

D Samekh

post

E f Xi

y 'Ayin

eye

0 0 Omicron

Q Pe

mouth

n ir Pi

V Tsade

javelin ?

(San — lost)

p Qoph

knot?

( Koppa — obsolete)

1 Resh

head

P p Rho

^ Shin

teeth

2 (T s Sigma

n Tau

mark

T T Tau

T V Upsilon 1

* </> Phi

•c

X X Chi

- fe

-V ^ Psi

fl w Omega

•0

124 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

lected as the type of a Semitic alphabet, because
it is more familiar than any other (cf. Taylor's
History of the Alphabet^ vol. i. p. 75).

Assuming the theory of the Phoenician origin
of the alphabet to be established, the next ques-
tion is, was that alphabet an independent inven-
tion, or was it adapted from another set of char-
acters ? As has been seen, all evidence goes to
show that sound-signs have been derived from
pictographs, and, if the Phoenician script be no
exception to this, search must be made for its
earlier forms. Tradition asserted that "the Phoe-
nicians did not claim to be themselves the invent-
ors of the art of writing, but admitted that it was
obtained by them from Egypt." So says Euse--
bius, and the same tradition has currency among
classic authorities from Plato to Tacitus, while
the fact of the active intercourse which long pre-
vailed between Phoenicia and Egypt goes far m
its support. The Phoenicians were of Semitic
race, "dwelling in ancient time, as they them-
selves report, upon the Erythrean Sea " (/. e. in
the neighbourhood of the Red Sea and the Persian
Gulf), "and thence they passed over and dwelt
in the country along the sea coast of Syria; and
this part of Syria and all as far as Egypt is called
Palestine" (Herodotus, vii. 89). But of their
origin and primitive migratio.ns, in truth, little
is known. Tyre, whose king, Hiram, gave Solo-
mon aid in the building of his famous temple, and
Sidon, are familiar names in the Bible, but that of
the " Phoenicians" does not once occur, reference
to them being probably included in the term " Ca-
naanite." Professor Huxley, always felicitous in
his phrases as he was supreme in exposition, aptly
called them the " colossal pedlars " of the ancient

EGYPTIAN WRITING. 125

world. The narrow strip of Syrian seaboard which
they occupied when we first meet them in history
was a meeting-place between East and West, and
the nursery of a maritime enterprise which looms
large in history. Their ships traded westward be-
yond the Pillars of Hercules, and eastward to the
Indian Ocean ; their colonists settled on both
shores of the Mediterranean, on the Euxine, and
were scattered over Asia Minor. Like the Ro-
mans, the Phoenicians had little creative instinct.
Designing or discovering little, but skilfully manu-
facturing and circulating much, they were distrib-
utors of the wares of their own and neighbouring
countries, and founded emporia in many a city of
the ancient world, as e.g. at Memphis, " round about
whose sacred enclosure, on that side of the temple
of Hephaistos which faces the north wind, dwell
Phoenicians of Tyre, this whole region being called
the camp of the Tyrians," or, as we should say,
the Tyrian quarter (Herodotus, ii. 112).

Obviously, one of the pressing needs of a peo-
ple thus brimful of commercial activity, to whom
" time was money," would be some swift and con-
cise mode of record of transactions. Hence the
supersession or abbreviation of cumbrous and
elaborated characters, with their apparatus of de-
terminatives, ideograms, and the like, by a simple
'' shorthand " sort of script. But of w/iat charac-
ters ? Influenced partly by the traditions already
referred to, partly by the fact of the intimate rela-
tions between Phoenicia and Egypt, and doubtless
by that principle of development the application
of which was extending in all directions, a French
Egyptologist, Emanuel de Rouge, read a paper
on the history of the alphabet before the Acade-
mie des Inscriptions in 1859 (the year of publica-

126 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

tion of Darwin's Origin of Species), which, in the
judgment of many scholars, appeared conclusive
as to the derivation of the Phoenician (and, through
that, of all other alphabets now in use) from the
Egyptian characters. The success which appeared
to attend M. de Rouge's researches "must be at-
tributed to his clear perception of the fact, itself
antecedently probable, that the immediate proto-
types of the Semitic letters mustjae sought, not,
as had hitherto been vainly attempted, among the
hieroglyphic pictures or the Egyptian monuments,
but among the cursive characters which the Egyp-
tians had developed out of their hieroglyphs, and
which were employed for literary and secular pur-
poses, the hieroglyphic writing being reserved for
monuments and sacred uses" (Taylor, i. p. 90).
The method which he adopted was admirable. He
took the oldest known forms of the Semitic letters
that he could discover, and compared these with
the oldest known forms of hieratic writing, confin-
ing that comparison to the twenty-five letters of
the so-called " Egyptian Alphabet." The materials
at his command were of the scantiest. On the
Egyptian side hieratic papyri of the new Empire
(which began about 1587 B.C.) existed in plenty,
but the characters in which they are written are
comparatively late. Fortunately, however, among
the very few examples of the oldest form of hier-
atic was the Papyrus Prisse (Fig. 50), and this
precious relic supplied M. de Rouge with the cur-
sive characters which made formulation of his
theory possible. On the Semitic side there are
the Egyptian words which are given in Semitic
form in the Old Testament, and the Semitic names
of Syrian towns which are found in the Egyptian
annals of conquests under the new Empire, through

EGYPTIAN WRITING. I 27

which the sounds severally represented by the Se-
mitic and hieratic characters are arrived at. The
chief source of epigraphic evidence was an inscrip-
tion (Fig. 51) on the sarcophagus of Eshmunazar,
king of Sidon, dating from the fifth century B.C.,
or about two thousand years later than the Papy-
rus Frisse, and therefore representing a late form
of the Phoenician alphabet.

The sarcophagus, which is preserved in the
Louvre, was found in a rock-tomb near the site
of ancient Sidon. The interpretation of the in-
scription upon it has exercised the skill of a host

Fig. 50. — Facsimile of hieratic Papyrus Prisse.

of scholars, and given rise to an enormous body
of literature. Eshmunazar, whose mask and
mummy are sculptured on the sarcophagus, speaks
in the first person. He calls himself " king of the
Sidonians, son of Tabnit," and tells how he and
his mother, the priestess of Ashtaroth, had built
temples to Baal Sidon, Ashtaroth, and Emun. He
beseeches the favour of the gods, and prays that
Dora, Joppa, and the fertile corn-lands of Sharon
may ever remain part of his kingdom. Well-nigh
in the words of Shakespeare's epitaph, he lays a
curse upon him who would molest his grave; such
an one " shall have no funeral couch with the Re-
phaim," that haunt the vasty halls of death. "I
9

128

THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

am cut off before my time ; few have been my days,
and I am lying in this coffin and ifi this tomb in the
place which I have built. Oh, then, remember this !
may no royal race, may no man open
my funeral couch, and may they not
seek after treasure, for no one has
hidden treasures here, nor move the
coffin out of my funeral couch, nor
molest me in this funeral bed by
putting in it another tomb." {Rec-
ords of the Past, vol. ix.)

Such, broadly speaking, were M,

de Rouge's materials for observa-

» Z tion and comparison, and there

^ Ja have been few more striking exam-

^.^-s* I pies of ingenuity of classification

^Q/ ^ and inference than those which his

w work supplies. In his excellent sum-

^^s;^£ mary of that work which Canon

.^n g Taylor gives in the first volume of

-^s^j^r-s^ g his indispensable History of the Al-

^^^^ '§. phabet (pp. 98-116), he refers the

student who desires full details to

M. de Rouge's posthumous Me'moire

». \ sur lorigine Egyptienne de Valphabet

^=^ "? Phe'nicien, and suggests that those

^'T^ ^ readers who care only for results

^^r '"' may even skip his summary. That

summary necessarily includes much

technical matter which will interest

^Pa=i.;s5^^^ only the trained philologist ; and in

^ the superficial survey of the subject

which is only possible, and perhaps

these pages, any details would be

Nevertheless, the accompanying

^4=^

desirable, in
out of place.

tabulated form of M. de Rough's results may be

EGYPTIAN WRITING. 1 29

followed by an example or two of the method
which secured them, and also by reference to
some earlier Semitic inscriptions which have come
to light since 1859.

M. DE ROUGE'S THEORY OF THE ORIGIN OF THE
ALPHABET.

I. Egyptian Hieroglyphics, facing to the left.
II. Egyptian Hieratic characters, facing to the right.
III. The oldest Phoenician letters, mostly from the Baal Leb-
anon inscription.
IV. The oldest Greek letters, from inscriptions at Thera and

Athens, reading from right to left.
V. The Lapidary Greek alphabet at the time of the Persian
war, reading from left to right.
VI. Greek uncials, from the Codex Alexandrinus, about
400 A.D.
VII. Greek minuscules.
VIII. The old alphabet of Italy.

IX. Lapidary Latin alphabet at the time of Cicero.

X. Latin uncials and minuscules.
XL Modern square Hebrew, derived from the Phoenician
letters in CoL III.

Our examples of M. de Rouge's method may
be taken from the letters b and //.

b. The Egyptians had two signs for this, the

"leg," 1/ which is the normal sign, and the

"crane" (see Fig. 2 in table on page 130), which
letter should be taken as the prototype of the Phoe-
nician (see Fig. 2, col. iii.). The reason may be
that the sound of the first symbol seems to have
been nearer to v than to b, the " crane " being used
as the equivalent of beth in the translation of sev-
eral Semitic names, such as Berytus (Beyrout) and
Khirba. The hieratic trace of the " leg " would,
moreover, be easily confused with that of some

I30

THE STORY OV THE ALPHABET.

tCrPTltm

IZ ="'"'■''

LATIN

limn

Eag'.e . .

%i^

AIA A

J^aa

Crane . .

^1^

B b 1

4
5
6
7
8

Throne . .

J'Y

/C 1

Hand . .

.-^

2);id

Maeander .

Cerastes .

<c^

Duck . .

^ 2;^

2 z

Sieve . .

h ;;

Tongs . .

c=S

«=>.

^s't®

Parallels ,

t 1 1

' J

Bowl . .

^z^

K k\ K

Lioness . .

1 1

'•^

Owl . . .

uiM\r

oi m

_X4_
15

Water . .

..^

^1.

H ^ r

A'l n n

Chair-back

—

•-M

—

E, ffi

+ |x x:

o 1 O

0 0

Shutter . .

;I1

TT cr P

P P

Snake . .

I"S

rir

^ r

iii

20
21

Angle . .

?!?

Mouth . .

«7

9 ? ^

P r

Inunuuied \
Garden /

iJiM

C CT

J{s

Lasso . .

] i

1
iT

r |T

T Z t

1 II III

V 1 VI

vn p VIII

IX X

EGYPTIAN WRITING. 131

Other letters, such as the " chick " and the " arm,"
and would therefore be inconvenient for adoption.

The Semitic character lx differs from its hier-
atic prototype ^ in having acquired a closed loop.

The closed form is so much easier to write that
the change presents no difficulty. But there is a
curious bit of indirect evidence which seems to
show that the Semitic in its earlier form was open,
something in the shape of an s- The Greek alpha-
bet used at Corinth, one of the earliest Phoenician
colonies in Hellas, must have been derived from
a type of the Semitic alphabet more archaic than
that which appears on the Moabite Stone (see p.
134). Now, in the old Corinthian alphabet the
letter deta is not closed, but open, p, its form
being almost identical with the hieratic prototype.
/i. The letter /le corresponds to the " maeand'er "
and the " knotted cord." The hieratic forms show
that the former must be taken as the prototype.
In the Papyrus Prisse there are two of this char-
acter; one, which is comparatively rare, is open
at the bottom, /77, ai^d corresponds to the Mo-
abite a. It is much more usual, however, to

find the character completely closed. The name
of the Semitic letter, which is generally supposed
to mean a " window," would indicate that the pre-
vious form of the letter agreed with the more
usual hieratic trace. This conjecture is curiously
confirmed by the evidence afforded by the early
inscriptions of Corinth, which, as we have seen in
the case of beta, occasionally preserve alphabetic
forms of a more archaic type than those found

132

THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

on the Moabite Stone itself. Now, in the primi-
tive alphabet of Corinth we find, instead of the

usual form of epsilon, a closed character N, which

/^V\ is nearly identical with

■^ ^ the form of the "maean-

der," most usual in the
Papyrus Prisse. (Tay-
lor, i. pp. I02, 1 14).

Among the more im-
portant Semitic inscrip-
tions, other than that
on the Eshmunazar
sarcophagus, are: (i)
the inscription on frag-
ments of sacred ves-
sels of bronze from the
temple of Baal Leba-
non, which is assigned
to the eleventh cen-
tury B. c. ; (2) the in-
scription of Mesha,
king of Moab, on a
slab of black basalt,
known as the Moabite
Stone, which is as-
signed to the ninth
century b. c. ; (3) the
lion weights from Nine-
veh, bearing the names
of Assyrian kings who
reigned during the sec-
ond half of the eighth
century B.C. ; and (4)
the inscription on a tablet in a tunnel which con-
veys water from the Virgin's Pool in the Kedron

EGYPTIAN WRITING, 133

Valley to the Pool of Siloam in the Tyropaeon.
The date of this inscription lies between the
eighth and the sixth centuries h.c.

1. The Baal Lebanon Vessels. — In 1876 M. Cler-
mont-Ganneau bought from a Cypriote dealer
some fragments of bronze plates bearing Phoeni-
cian characters (Fig. 52). They were traced to a
peasant who had found them when digging, and
who had broken up the metal in the hope that it
was of gold. The industry and skill of MM. Re-
nan and Clermont-Ganneau pierced the fragments
together in such wise as to warrant the inference
that they were portions of sacred bowls, an infer-
ence confirmed by the longest of the inscriptions,
which declared that " this vessel of good bronze
was offered by a citizen of Carthage, servant of
Hiram, king of the Sidonians, to Baal Lebanon,
his Lord," whose temple was one of the " high
places" dedicated to the god.

2. The Moabite Stone (Fig. 53). — This, perhaps
the most famous, and, certainly, one of the most
important, of Semitic relics, was discovered in
1868 by Dr. Klein, a German missionary, during
his travels in Moab. The Arabs who escorted
him took him to see an inspired stone, the Phoeni-
cian characters on which w^ere beautifully cut in
thirty-four lines. The doctor copied a few words,
and resumed his journey. On reaching Jerusalem
he made known his discovery, whereupon compe-
tition was started between the French and Ger-
man Consulates for purchase of the coveted treas-
ure. This aroused the suspicion of the Arabs, to
whom the stone had become a sort of talisman on
which the fertility of their crops depended — that
is, when they had industry enough to plant them.
Messengers sent by M. Clermont-Ganneau sue-

134

THE STORY OK THE ALPHABET.

ceeded in taking a squeeze of the inscription,

which made the Arabs still more hostile, and in

the end, after
the Turkish gov-
ernor of Nablus
had vainly tried
to secure the
stone for himself
— of course to
sell at a profit to
the " infidel " —
the Arabs put a
fire under it, then
poured cold wa-
ter over it, and
smashed it into
fragments, which
were distributed
as charms among
the tribe. But
the tact of M.
Clermont - Gan-
neau recovered
nearly all the
pieces, so that, a
few lines except-
ed, the inscrip-
tion is complete.
The original is
preserved in the
Louvre, and a
very good cast

of it may be seen in the Phoenician department of

the British Museum.

The inscription, which is written in a language

resembling closely the Hebrew of the Old Testa-

EGYPTIAN WRITING. 135

ment, gives Mesha's account of his rebellion
against the King of Israel, to whom he had hith-
erto paid yearly tribute of the wool of a hundred
thousand lambs and a hundred thousand rams.
Historically the monument is of high value.
Mesha speaks of himself as the son of Chemosh-
melek, whose position as the national god of the
petty kingdom of Moab corresponds to that of
Yahweh or Jehovah among the Israelites. The
reference to Chemosh throws light on the corre-
spondences in belief between the several Semitic
peoples. The " high place " or altar of the god,
his anthropomorphic character as angry, as urg-
ing his votaries to battle and to slaughter of
their foes, giving them no quarter — all this is
identical with the Hebrew conception of deity, so
that the inscription, mutatis vmtandis, reads like a
transcript from the warlike annals of the Old
Testament. From the epigraphic standpoint,
which alone concerns us here, the inscription is
regarded by Canon Taylor and other scholars as
supporting the theory of M. de Rouge.

3. The Lion Weights (Fig. 54). — Several exam-
ples of these were found by the late Sir Austin
Layard in his first excavations at Nineveh. They
are bilingual, the names of the Assyrian kings
being usually in cuneiform writing, while the
weights are indicated in Phoenician characters.
Of course this evidences intimate trading rela-
tions between Assyria and Phoenicia, and the
commercial dominance of the latter in the adop-
tion of its weights and measures as the metrical
standard of the former, and in the general use of
the Phoenician alphabet for business purposes.
The action of time has largely obliterated the
inscriptions, but among the names of Assyrian

136

THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

kings which have been identified are Tiglath-Peser,
Shalmaneser IV., Sargon II., and Sennacherib.
The similarity between the Phoenician and As-
syrian characters is shown in the inscription here
reproduced, which is to scale of the original. It

is on the eleventh lion, which weighs a little over
twenty ounces, and therefore represents a maneh,
a Hebrew weight used in estimating gold and
silver, and believed to contain one hundred shekels
of the former and sixty of the latter. The read-

EGYPTIAN WRITING. 137

ing is MaN^H M(?l^k, "a maneh of the king." The
name is not very legible, but is read by Professor
Sayce as Shalmaneser, who reigned in the seventh
century b.c.

4. The Siioatn Inscription. — The tunnel in which
this was found was doubtless constructed to se-
cure the water supply of Jerusalem in the event
of a siege, the Virgin's Pool being outside the
city walls, while the Pool of Siloam is inside the
boundaries of the old rampart. Encrustations of
carbonate of lime made the decipherment of the
letters very difficult on their first discovery in
18S0, but enough was seen to prove their high
importance for the study of the development of
the Hebrew alphabet in its passage from the
Phoenician to the Aramean type, whence the
modern characters are derived. " It was recog-
nised at once that the Hebrew inscription of a
date prior to the Captivity had at last been dis-
covered, and that the uncertainties as to the na-
ture of the alphabet of Israel would now be set at
rest." The letters were carefully cleared of their
accretion ; squeezes, tracings, and casts were ob-
tained, and the Hebrew record, engraved in Phoe-
nician characters nearly resembling those on the
Moabite Stone, thus Englished, of course more or
less conjecturally in detail, by Professor Sayce : —

(i) (Behold the) excavation ! Now this is the history of
the tunnel. While the excavators (were lifting up)

(2) the pick each to his neighbour, and while there were
yet three cubits (to be broken through) . . . the voice of one
call-

(3) -ed to his neighbour, for there was (an excess ?) in the
rock on the right. They rose up . . . they struck on the west
of the

(4) excavation, the excavators struck each to meet his
neighbour pick to pick, and there flowed

138 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

(5) the waters from their outlet to the Pool for the dis.
tance of 1000 cubits and (three-fourths ?)

(6) of a cubit was the height of the rock at the head of
the excavation here.

The inscription is interesting if only as show-
ing how modern methods of tunnelling were an-
ticipated by these ancient engineers. One gang
of men began boring at one end and another
gang at the other end, thus advancing till both
met, and the failure to make the connection which
is spoken of in "the (excess) in the rock on
the right" has confirmation in the existence
of two "blind alleys" in the tunnel, showing
how the borings overlapped. The accuracy with
which, aided by the most recent appliances
worked by compressed air, the passages through
miles of rock have been bored until the men at
either end meet face to face in the middle, is
among the romantic achievements of modern sci-
ence. The Samaritan alphabet is the sole sur-
viving lineal descendant of the Phoenician, which
in whatever degree the parent of all extant al-
phabets, became extinct with the decline of Phoe-
nicia herself, and the characters are now recover-
able only through the inscriptions of which exam-
ples have been given.

M. de Rouge's theory of the source of that
alphabet, and of the variants to which it has given
rise, has not passed unchallenged. It belongs to
the class of hypotheses which lend themselves to
the straining of facts in their support, and there-
fore demand evidence amounting to demonstra-
tion. The superficial resemblances between the
written characters are cited as proof of relation,
no play being given to that independence of
origin of which numerous examples occur in other

EGYPTIAN WRITING. 1 39

branches of human development. In his article
on Hieroglyphics in the Encyclopcedia Britannica,
Mr. Reginald Poole remarks that " the hieratic
forms vary, like all cursive forms of writing, with
the hand of each scribe. Consequently, the
writers who desire to establish their identity with
Phoenican can scarcely avoid straining the evi-
dence." Moreover, the long lapse of time be-
tween the materials for comparison invites cau-
tion. The Papyrus Prisse is at least two thousand
years older than the Eshmunazar inscription, and
on these two hang the validity of M. de Rouge's
theory. Another contention is that certain Se-
mitic letters represent sounds which are peculiar
to that language, and for which no equivalent
signs could be adopted from the Egyptian, to
which, however, the reply is that in the borrow-
ing of characters it suffices to select those repre-
senting similar, although not the same, sounds.
The objection that the names of the Semitic let-
ters are not those of the hieroglyphs is met by
the principle of aerology (see pp. 79, 94). The
question is also asked, Why did not the Phoenicians
borrow the hieroglyphic instead of the hieratic
characters ? Mr. Arthur Evans thinks that in
some cases this was done, a few of the letters of
the Phoenician alphabet coming direct from the
pictorial symbols, as Alpha {A/e/=a.n ox), from
the hieroglyph of an ox's head ; Zefa [zayin =
weapons), from the two-edged axe; Sigma [samech
= a post), from the sign of a tree ; Omikron [Ai'n
= an eye), from the circle used to represent the
eye ; £ia and E-psilon {cheth = a fence and He
= a window), from signs for a wall or door or
window. Canon Taylor, however, argues that
the derivation must have been on the lines laid

I40 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

down by M. de Rouge, the Semitic alphabet
originating among a colony of aliens of that race
settled in Lower Egypt, either as slaves, traders,
frontier guards, or conquerors. In any case these
intruders would be strangers to the religion and
the language of the Egyptians. It would, there-
fore, be more likely that they should make use of
the cursive and easy hieratic, which was ordinarily
employed in Egypt for secular and commercial
purposes, than that they should adopt the difficult
sacred script which was reserved by the Egyptian
priesthood for monumental and religious uses.
This supposition is confirmed by the singular ab-
sence of any hieroglyphic monument which can
be assigned to the three dynasties of Semitic
rulers known as the Hyksos or Shepherd Kings,
who were e.xpelled from Lower Egypt by the
Theban Ramesides.

Canon Taylor admits that if, among the ob-
jections raised by Professor Lagarde, that based
on the want of adequate resemblance between the
Semitic letters and the hieratic forms can be sus-
tained, M. de Rouge's theory falls to the ground.
The Canon, a staunch, although perfectly candid,
supporter of that theory, very properly lays stress
on the tendency of things borrowed to partake of
the character of the borrower. That they are bor-
rowed at all implies a certain adaptableness in
them which permits modification of type, espe-
cially when the writing has to be inscribed on an-
other kind of material. The early hieratic writ-
ing was traced on papyrus with a soft reed-stump,
while the Semitic was cut upon a stone with a
chisel^ to the loss of flowing lines and curves.
" Looking broadly at the two scripts, Hieratic and
Moabite, we see in the first place that the Semitic

EGYPTIAN WRITING. 141

writing is distinguished by greater symmetry and
greater simplicity. The letters have become more
regular and uniform : more angular, more firm,
and more erect; the differences in relative size
have diminished; the complicated and difficult
characters especially being straightened or cur-
tailed." {History of the Alphabet, i. 125.) Sum-
ming up the several objections, of which only the
more important have been noted here. Canon Tay-
lor, amending nothing in the recent reprint of his
book, remains satisfied as to the soundness of
M. de Rouge's theory. '• Not only is it on a
priori grounds the probable solution, not only
does it agree with the ancient tradition, not only
does it supply a possible and reasonable explana-
tion of the facts, not only is it confirmed by all
sorts of curious coincidences, but no objection
has been urged against it to which a sufficient
answer cannot be found. If we reject M. de
Rouge's explanation of the origin of the alphabet,
there is practically no rival theory on which to
fall back. There are only three other possible
sources, none of which can, at present, be re-
garded in any higher light than as a mere guess.
If the Semitic letters were not derived from Egypt
they must have been invented by the Phoenicians,
or they must have been developed either out of
the Hittite hieroglyphics, or out of one of the
cuneiform syllabaries." {lb., p. 130.) The pos-
sible relation of the still undeciphered Hittite
hieroglyphs to other scripts will have reference
presently, and perhaps Deecke's theory of the
derivation of the Phoenician from the Assyrian
cuneiform has some measure of truth in it. For
cuneiform appears to be essentially a Semitic
script, and the Phoenicians in their contact with

142 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

Other Semitic peoples would, it may be assumed,
have retained and adapted some, if not all, of the
cuneiform characters long before they became
familiar with Egyptian hieroglyphic or hieratic.
Granting, however, all that the upholders of M. de
Rouge's theory may demand, their inference as to
the direct connection between the Greek and
other alphabets and the Phoenician alphabet is
not necessarily to be accepted. On this question
of relation new and important light is thrown by
recent discoveries, whose significance will be deal;t
with in the following section. ^

CHAPTER IX.

THE CRETAN AND ALLIED SCRIPTS. [

When treating of the sources whence civilisa-
tion flowed westward centuries before Greece and
Rome appear, the historian turns to the valleys of
the Nile and the Euphrates. For Egypt and Chal-
dea have meant so much to us all in our search
after the chief influences on man's intellectual
and spiritual history, and this with increasing
warrant, because the more widely investigation
is pushed, the more venerable is the past of both
countries found to have been. In the case of
Babylon we have seen that the art of writing —
that index of culture — had passed the pictographic
stage long before eight thousand years ago, while
the Egyptian hieroglyphs, which probably came
in with the dynasties, and therefore date from the
re'gn of Menes, the first historical king, are some
thirteen hundred years later, so far as their use in

THE CRETAN AND ALLIED SCRIPTS. 143

the Nile Valley is concerned. Hence the Baby-
lonian script carries the palm in point of age.
Fortunately the records of both these ancient
civilisations are fairly continuous, of Babylonia
to the downfall of the empire, and of Egypt to
the present time. Assessing the contributions of
each to human progress, the verdict appears to be
in favour of Babylonia, and " we now know that,
high as was the development of Egyptian civilisa-
tion in certain directions, it was by no means the
fertile mother of other civilisations. All modern
writers are agreed that religious cults and na-
tional customs are exactly what the Greeks did
not borrow from Egypt, any more than the He-
brews borrowed thence their religion, or the Phoe-
nicians their commerce." .(Mr. Percy Gardner's
New Chapters in Greek History, p. 193.) But if
Egypt was no "house of bondage "to Israel, it
has been the enslaver of Christendom. It fet-
tered a faith, which had flourished in the freedom
of the spirit, with Trinitarianism, Mariolatry, and
^Monasticism. Out of one or another of its triads
emerged the dogma of the Christian Trinity, and
in the child Horus, seated in the lap of Isis, we
see the profound significance of the words, " Out
of Egypt have I called my Son." The obelisk
that fronts St. Peter's at Rome symbolises the
historical fact that approach to the Christian
Church is through the pronaos of the Egyptian
temple.

Explorations in Greece and the surrounding
archipelago within the last few years have brought
to light a third venerable centre of culture. About
thirty years ago Dr. Schliemann, digging in pre-
historic soil, believed that he had found the pal-
ace of Odysseus and the towers of Ilios. " The
10

144 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

bones of Agamemnon are a show." The world
laughed at him, but, if it takes a more sober view
of his discoveries than Schliemann did, it has
come to recognise their value and to prosecute
his work. The remarkable result of these discov-
eries is, in the words of Mr. D. G. Hogarth, to
show that " man in Hellas was more highly civil-
ised before history than when history begins to
record his state; and there existed human society
in the Hellenic area, organised and productive, to
a period so remote that its origins were more dis-
tant from the age of Pericles than that age is from
our own. We have probably to deal with a total
period of civilisation in the ^gean not much
shorter than in the Nile Valley." {Authority and
ArchcBology, p. 230.) The general subject cannot
be pursued here, and we have to keep to the nar-
rower track opened up within the past five years
in the island of Crete by Mr. Arthur J. Evans.
His discoveries there establish (i) the fact of an
indigenous culture, and (2) of an active inter-
course between Crete and Greece, Egypt, Syria,
and other countries centuries before the Phoeni-
cians launched their craft upon the midland sea
and trafficked with Cypriote and Cretan, or sailed
beyond the Pillars of Hercules. Full accounts of
Mr. Evans's important work have for the most
part been contributed by him from time to time
to the memoirs of learned societies, but no state-
ment in popular form has yet appeared. What
now follows will therefore be in large degree an
abstract of his paper on " Primitive Pictographs
and a Prae-Phoenician Script from Crete and the
Peloponnese," published in 1\\q Journal of Heiiemc
Studies, vol. xiv., Part II., 1894, pp. 270-372, and
reprinted under the title Cretan Pictographs, 1895.

THE CRETAN AND ALLIED SCRIPTS. 145

During a visit to Greece in 1893, Mr. Evans
came across some small stones bearing engraved
symbols which appeared to be hieroglyphic in
character, approximating in form to Hittite, but
having features of their own. They were traced
to a Cretan source, and inquiry in Berlin elicited
the fact that the Imperial Museum there possessed
stones of corresp'onding character, which also came
from Crete. With this and other corroborative
evidence in hand, Mr. Evans decided to follow up
his inquiries on Cretan soil, and began his inves-
tigations there in the spring of 1894. He chose
the eastern part of the island as the more likely
district for discovery of prehistoric remains, be-
cause, up to the dawn of history, it had been occu-
pied tjy the " Eteocretes," or primitive non-Hel-
lenic folk. At Praesos he obtained some stones
inscribed with hieroglyphic or pictorial, and also
with linear or quasi-alphabetic characters, the
preservation of those objects through the vast
lapse of time since they were engraved being
largely due to their use as charms by the Cretan
women, who wear these " milk-stones," as they
call them, during the period of child-bearing.
Where, owing to this superstition, Mr. Evans was
unable to secure the stones themselves, he ob-
tained impressions of the characters on them. In
exploring Goulas, the ruins of which are larger
than those of any other prehistoric site, whether
in Greece or Italy, Mr. Evans acquired important
additions to his collection in the shape (i) of a
cornelian gem bearing the image of a rayed sun
and a sprig of foliage ; (2) of an ox in terra-cotta ;
and (3) a clay cup on which were three graffito
{i.e. rudely scribbled) characters, two of them be-
ing identical with the Cypriote/tz and /o. A neigh-

146

THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

bouring hamlet, Prodromos Botzano, yielded a plain
terra-cotta vase of primitive aspect with incised
hatching round its neck, and three more graffito

Fig. 55. — Vase with incised characters (Crete).

symbols of the same kind, one of which seemed to
represent the double axe-head occurrmg among
the hieroglyphic forms reduced to a linear out-

line ; while the last,
^ \ as in the clay cup

from Goulas, was
identical with /o. At
another village near
Goulas, Mr. Evans
procured a double-
headed bronze axe
with an engraved
symbol, with which
he compares signs on a bronze axe from Delphi,
the first of these lookmg like a rude outline of a

Fig. 56.-

-Incised characters on cup
(Crete).

THE CRETAN AND ALLIED SCRIPTS. 147

duck or some other aquatic bird. Some of the
walls at Knosos bear certain marks which were at
first passed by as mere scratchings by masons,
but which Mf. Evans is satisfied are taken from
a regular script, and fit on, in fact, to the same
system as the characters on the pottery and seals^

<y^A

Fig. 57. — Characters on vase (Crete).

the various positions in which the signs, as e.g.
the double axe, appear, warranting the inference
that they were engraved on the blocks before
these were placed in situ. Neither these nor the
signs graven on the steatite and other small stones
are the outcome of mere fancy, or of that cacoethes
scribendi, or " scribbling itch," which wantonly de-
faces the monuments of past and
present times. "Limited as is the
number of stones that we have to
draw from, it will be found that
certain symbols are continually re-
curring, as certain letters or sylla-
bles or words would recur in any
form of writing. Thus the human
eye appears four times and on as
many different stones, the 'broad ^'°- 58.— Sigrns

-' , . ' , , on bronze axe

arrow seven times, and another (Delphi).
uncertain instrument eleven times.
The choice of symbols is evidently restricted by
some practical consideration, and while some ob-

148 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

jects are of frequent occurrence, others equally
obvious are conspicuous by their absence. But

o^¥

g^/

^ id*

a y

Fig. 59. — Signs on blocks of Myceniian buildings (Knosos).

THE CRETAN AND ALLIED SCRIPTS.

149

an engraver filling the space on the seals for
merely decorative purposes would not thus have

Fig. 60.— Symbols on three- Fig. 61.— Symbols on four-sided
sided corneUan (Crete). stone (Crete;.

15°

THE STORV OF THE ALPHABET.

been trammelled in his selection." {Jo. Hellenic
Studies, p. 300.) Some of the symbols are abbre-
viated, e.g. the head indicating the whole ani.

Fig. 62. — Symbols on four-sided stones, with larger faces
(Central Crete).

mal, or a flower the whole plant, thus showing an
approach to the ideographic stage of writing.
In further example of this there is the expression

of ideas and emotions

in graphic form, as in /^ ^~v wl

the various positions of I^P-V^ ^'^'* ' •

the arms and hands, "l \\

Fig. 63. — Symbol on single-
faced cornelian (Eastern
Crete).

Fig. 64. — Symbol on stone of
ordinary Mycenjean type
(Athens).

and SO forth. The symbols also frequently occur
in groups of from two to seven, indicating that

THE CRETAN AND ALLIED SCRIPTS. 15 I

a syllabic value was given to them, and certain
fixed principles of arrangement appear to govern
the place of certain signs. Altogether, the conclu-
sion seems warranted that the symbols are not
haphazard, but purposive, although, until the ma-
terials for judgment have largely increased, the
purposes are not easy to particularise. Generally,
like all other writing, their object was to tell some-
thing, perchance, as already shown (p. 47), infor-
mation about the avocations of their owners, thus
ranking as primitive " merchants' marks."

The stones thus bearing symbols of a system
of writing in use within the limits of the Myce-
naean world in pre-Phoenician times are arranged
in five groups by Mr. Evans: (i) three-sided or
prism-shaped (Fig. 60) ; (2) four-sided equilateral
(Fig. 61); (3) four-sided with larger faces (Fig.
62) ; (4) with one engraved side, the upper part
being ornamented with a convoluted relief (Fig.
63) ; (5) stones of ordinary Mycenaean type
(Fig. 64).

The Hieroglyphic symbols engraved on the
twenty-one stones described and depicted by Mr.
Evans number eighty-two, and comprise pictorial
and ideographic forms, summarised by him as
follows : —

1. The human body and its parts

2. Arms, implements, and instruments

3. Parts of houses and household utensils

4. Marine subjects ....

5. Animals and birds ....

6. Vegetable forms ....

7. Heavenly bodies and derivatives .

8. Geographical or topographical signs

9. Geometrical figures
10. Uncertain symbols

4
12

IS*

THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

From the foregoing, all of which are repre-
sented in Mr. Evans's monograph, these may be
selected as examples : —

1. a. Ideograph of a man with arms held downwards, perhaps

to denote ownership. Human figures in like position
are frequent on Cypriote cylinders.
b. Ideograph of gesture which may indicate ten or any mul-
tiple of ten.

2. a. This type of double axe is non-Egyptian. As a Hittite

hieroglyph it has been found on an inscription ; it is
seen repeated in pairs on a Cypriote cylinder, and it
also forms the principal type of some Mycenaean gems
found at Crete, in the caves of which island bronze
axes of this shape are common in the votive deposits.

The " arrow " with a short shaft is frequent, one variety
showing the feather shaft. Similar figures are occa-
sionally seen in the field of Mycenaean gems found in
the island, where they represent arrows of the chase
about to strike wild goats or other animals. The Hit-
tite hieroglyphic series presents some close parallels.

3. Gate, door, or part of a fence.

4. a. The first of these vessels is accompanied with two cres-

cents, one on either side of the mast, perhaps a sign
of time as applied to the duration of the voyage (see
p. 47). One ship has seven oars visible, the other six.

THE CRETAN AND ALLIED SCRIPTS.

153

In form these vessels show a great resemblance to
those which appear as the principal type on a class of
Mycenaean lentoid gems.
b. Apparently a tunny-fish. Fish as hieroglyphic symbols
are common to Egypt and Chalda;a.

% n^

5«

5. a. Head of he-goat. This symbol presents a remarkable
similarity to the Hittite hieroglyph of the same object

^-^^j The Egyptian goat's-head sign is of a dif-
ferent character, the neck being given as well as the
head, which is beardless.

b. Bull or ox. The seal on which it occurs is of primitive

c. Bird standing. Birds in a somewhat similar position

occur among the Hittite symbols at Jerabis and Bul-
gar Maden, and are frequent in Egyptian hiero-
glyphics.

6. a. Vegetable forms, similar to those found on Hittite monu-
ments.
b. Floral symbol. The dot above both examples probably
represents the head of a stamen or pistil, as of the lily.

154 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

7. a. Day-star, or sun, with eight revolving rays.

b. Rays. Star-like symbols occur on Syrian and Asianic

seal-stones.

c. This symbol, with its swastika-like offshoots, may be of

7<j ^c

solar import. The concentric circles may be compared
with the Egyptian ^OJ, Sun with twelve rays, Sep ■=

times, and with the Chinese hieroglyph for sun with
its central dot.
Apparently hieroglyphics of mountains and valleys, hence
"country" or "land." The Egyptian Q/^ men =
mountain, is applied in the same way as a determina-
tive for "districts" and "countries." As f^^"^ snut

= granary, it reappears, with one ar two heaps of com
in the middle, in the simple sense of a " plot of
ground." The Akkadian symbol, which also means
a plot of ground, exhibits a form {^^ similar to the
above,
" In this connection," says Mr. Evans, " a truly remark-
able coincidence is observable between the pictographic sym-
bolism of old Chaldsea and that of the Cretans of the Myce-
naean period. The linear form of the Akkadian U(-iu ^^1

shows a sun above the symbol of the ground with a plant grow-
ing out of it. But on specimens of Mycenaean gems observed
by me in Eastern Crete are seen symbolic or conventional
representations of the plant growing out of the ground." {^Jo.
Hell. Stud., p. 313.)

THE CRETAN AND ALLIED SCRIPTS. 155

The Linear signs, although treated separately
for purposes of convenience, are regarded by Mr.
Evans (see Table I) as fundamentally connected
with the hieroglyphic, the one, as in other scripts,
overlapping the other. As to this connection,
however, some doubt exists. The thirty-two
characters which Mr. Evans has detected are in-
creased to thirty-eight by Dr. Tsountas {Myce-
naan Age, p. 279), while the materials yielding
these results received an important addition
through Mr. Evans's discovery, in the spring of
1896, of an inscribed steatite slab, associated
with numerous votive objects, in the great cave
of Mount Dikta, the fabled birthplace of Zeus.
" It consists of a fragment of what may be de-
scribed as a ' Table of Offerings,' bearing part of
what appears to be a dedication of nine letters of
probably syllabic values, answering to the same
early Cretan script that is seen on the seals, and
with two punctuations." (Address of Arthur J.
Evans to Section H, Anthropology, of the British
Association, 1896; Nature, i Oct. 1896, p. 531.)

These linear forms are inscribed on three-
sided seal stones, in every respect resembling
those bearing the pictographic signs ; on stea-
tite pendants and whorls; and, as already shown,
in graffiti on pottery, or inscribed blocks, and so
forth, from all which sources Mr. Evans has put
together the thirty-two characters shown in Table
II, adding corresponding characters from Cypriote
and Egyptian scripts. Table III gives examples
of the characters — doubtless syllabic — occurring
in groups of two or more.

The hieroglyphic-bearing signet stones have
been found solely in the region east of Knosos,
and the use of these characters appears not to

,*.CtAN CVPRlOTE *~1' SCt/>N CVfR-*l

PICTQCRAPHS ,^lf^[;^l^ I SE/»MTic PICTOCRAPHS ||_|^p^|^ SEWITII

. jo..-

/Wo'SAe/tAN
FOR« or

2.AYIH -

l7r?=|

OJOTI/

CYPR

D
Q

SEM «^

\l_-/

"^-.^

<-:-'i

.^^

ox AND OXES HEAD Followed

BY THE SAME SVM60L C* JPPO-

4- + SE«

_L -4- SMM£XV

TABLE

PICTOCRAPHS AND LINEAR SYMBOLS
COMPARtO.

'Mi JM
K/1 1'' '^^"^

TAPy F 1.

a i

I
CC

-r
t

E
CD

n ^

F F ^

V V
H H

T
Y

□3

it ~ *

z 3 >•

(1/

o »-
> r

A
V

CD.

TABLE II.

158

THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

have passed beyond the island ; in fact it may
have been limited to the less advanced portions.
This tells against the direct descent of the Cretan
linear from the Cretan pictographic, and, more-

T ABLE

CROUPS or lINCAR SYMBOLS

' VNX^^ -f-

TABLE HL

over, it is contended by Dr. Tsountas that the
pictographic system exercised slight, if any, influ-
ence on the Hellenic portion of Greece. But, in
the absence of materials which excavations now
being prosecuted may bring to light, any definite

THE CRETAN AND ALLIED SCRIPTS. 159

conclusions are premature, and only the broadest
general views permissible. Of the thirty-two
pictographic symbols sixteen approach to Egyp-
tian and sixteen to Hittite forms, but all have,
none the less, an independent character stamping
them as indigenous. Although the coincidences
are at times of such a character as to suggest a
real affinity, it must be remembered that the simi-
larity in many of the objects to be depicted ex-
plains the correspondences between the picture-
writing of different peoples. " Some Cretan types
present a surprising analogy with the Asianic; on
the other hand, many of the most recent of the
Hittite symbols are conspicuous by their absence.
The parallelism can best be explained by suppos-
ing that both systems had grown up in a more or
less conterminous area out of still more primitive
pictographic elements. In the early picture-writ-
ing of a region geographically continuous there
may well have been originally many common ele-
ments, such as we find among the American Indians
at the present day ; and when, later, on the banks
of the Orontes and the highlands of Cappadocia
on the one side, or on the ^gean shores on the
other, a more formalised 'hieroglyphic' script
began independently to develop itself out of these
simpler elements, what more natural than that
certain features common to both should survive
in each ? ]>ater inter-communication may have
also contributed to preserve this common element.
But the symbolic script with which we have here
to deal is essentially in situ. The Cretan system
of picture-writing is inseparable from the area
dominated by the Mycensan form of culture.
Geographically speaking it belongs to Greece."
i^Jo. Helleyi. Stud., p. 317.)
11

l6o THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

While, as remarked above, the hieroglyph-
bearing stones are found only in Crete, examples
of the linear character have been found at Myce-
n?e, Nauplia, and other prehistoric sites in Greece
and Egypt. Moreover, as already noted, some of
the signs have marked affinities with Cypriote,
Hittite, and Semitic.

Among the antiquities which make the Fayum
so renowned a district are the remains of two
cities ; Kahun, which dates from the twelfth dy-
nasty, i.e. 2500 B.C., and Gurob, which is some
twelve centuries later, both sites yielding evi-
dence of Asian and ^-Egean settlers. When dig-
ging there ten years ago Professor Flinders Petrie
discovered fragments of Mycenrean, or, as he calls
it, yEgean, pottery inscribed with characters re-
sembling, and in some cases identical with those
found in Greece. Both the Professor and Mr.
Evans agree that the relics unearthed at Kahun
are as old as that city ; while, speaking of the
signs known to be in use 1200 B.C., in a place
occupied by people of the yEgean and Asia Minor,
Turseni, Akhaians, Hittites, and others, Professor
Flinders Petrie remarks that " it will require a
very certain proof of the supposed Arabian source
of the Phoenician alphabet before we can venture
to deny that we have here the origin of the Medi-
terranean alphabets." {Ten Years' Digging in
Egypt, p. 134.) Conversely, scarabs of the twelfth
dynasty have been found in Crete, notable among
these being one in steatite with a spiral ornament
peculiar to that period.

Passing to excavations in the huge mound of
Tell-el-Hesy, in Palestine, made up of the ruins
of eleven different cities heaped up one above
another, we have the discovery, amongst remains

THE CRETAN AND ALLIED SCRIPTS.

l6l

of the fourth city, dating about 1450 b.c, of
potsherds inscribed with signs similar to the
-^gean.

While about twenty per cent, of the Cretan
hieroglyphs approach those of the Egyptian in

EGYPTIAN SCARABS XIITH DYNASTY.

early cretan seal-stones.
Fig. 65.

character, twenty out of the thirty-two linear
signs there are practically identical with those
found in Egypt. Mr. Evans adds that " the paral-
lelism with Cypriote forms is also remarkable,
some fifteen agreeing with letters of the Cypriote
syllabary."

l62

THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

Thi
in the

s syllabar
island of

■z

-J

-4-

»-

TH"-'

y, as its name implies, is found
Cyprus, which, lying only sixty
miles from Asia Minor, might
be expected to yield many
traces of active intercourse
therewith from prehistoric
times. The affinity of its an-
cient script with those of West-
ern Asia, which may be looked
upon as settled, had, therefore,
much to commend it at the
outset of the inquiry. It stands
in nearest relation, possibly as
its direct descendant, to the
syllabary of the Hittites. Ref-
erences to these people come
apace nowadays, and their his-
tory has been padded out in
portly volumes, but, in truth,
we know no more about them
than we do about the Phoeni-
cians and Phrygians, which
means that we know very little
indeed. Through the mists of
the past, with the help of such
light as is thrown by tablets
from Tell-el-Amarna, sculptures
from Karnak, and by Hebrew
and other records, we have
glimpses of a great and power-
ful empire which stretched from
the Euphrates to the Euxine,
pushing its borders to the con-
fines of Egypt, against which,
on the one hand, and Assyria
on the other, it waged war for

THE CRETAN AND ALLIED SCRIPTS. 1 63

a thousand years. In 1270 b.c. Rameses III. had
to face the onrush of the Hittites and other con-
federated peoples, whom he defeated at Migdol.
They " had overrun Syria. The islands and
shores of the Mediterranean gave forth their
piratical hordes ; the sea was covered with their
light galleys, and swept by their strong oars."
Rawlinson's {History of Ancietit Egypt, vol. ii. p.
271.) According to Dr. Wright, the Hittites ap-
pear in history for the first time " in the inscrip-
tion of Sargon I., King of Agane, about 1900 B.C.,
and disappear from history in the inscriptions of
Sargon 717 b.c." {Empire of the Hittites, p. 122.)
Until some thirty years ago no monumental re-
mains had come to light concerning an empire
whose high place among ancient nations is attest-
ed by the discovery of a treaty (the oldest known
example of its kind) with Egypt, in which each
recognised the other as a power equal in rank to
itself, and agreed to help it in case of need. The
first Hittite relic, a block of basalt engraved with
strange hieroglyphic signs, was found by the
traveller Burckhardt in 1812 at Hamah, on the
Orontes, but he could not decipher the characters,
and the matter was forgotten till 1870, when the
stone was rediscovered, and similar relicsbrought
to light. But to this day the key of interpreta-
tion IS lacking, and scholars await the unearthing'
of some bilingual monument which shall do for
the Hittite hieroglyphs what the Rosetta Stone
did for the Egyptian hieroglyphs and the Behistun
rock for cuneiform writing. Till this, and more,
is effected, we remain in the realm of conjecture
about the mighty nation whose beardless soldiers
are depicted with daggers in their belts and double-
headed axes in their hands on the sculptures of

164 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

the Nile Valley. Minimising, however, our knowl-
edge of the Hittites to the uttermost, their widely
distributed relics evidence their proficiency in cer-
tain departments of the arts. They smelted siU

^^^^

Fig. 67. — Hittite inscription at Hamah.

ver and wrought in bronze, they were skilful lapi-
daries and carvers in ivory, and "the independent
system of picture-writing w^hich they possessed
offers an obvious source from which the Asianic
syllabary might have been obtained." In the
Hamah inscriptions the characters are raised, and
run in parallel transverse lines.

" The lines of inscriptions and their bound-
aries are clearly defined by raised bars about
four inches apart. The interstices between the
bars and characters have been cut away." The
inscriptions are read from right to left and vice
versa in " boustrophedon " style {bous, "an ox,"
and strepho, " to turn," therefore, as an ox
ploughs), as in ancient Greek modes of writing.

Returning to Crete, w^e have to consider its
relation to the Mycenaean type of civilisation,
under which term is included civilisation in pre-
Homeric Greece and the .-Egean Sea, crossing
thence to Hissarlik, the ancient Troy. The spade
has made havoc with some of our standard " au-
thorities." Grote refers to the city of Mycenae
only once in his well-known work, and then inci-

THE CRETAN AND ALLIED SCRIPTS. 165

dentally speaks of it as the seat of a legendary
dynasty. Sir George Cox, in his " Mythology of
the Aryan Nations," endorses Professor Max Mai-
ler's theory (to which, in part, the veteran philolo-
gist still adheres), that the siege of Troy " is a
reflection of the daily siege of the East by the
solar powers that every evening are robbed of
their brightest treasures in the West," and adds
that this theory is "supported by a mass of evi-
dence which probably hereafter will be thought
ludicrously excessive in amount." The laugh is
on the other side now. Schliemann and his suc-
cessors have broken into the areas within Cyclo-
pean walls whose massive blocks aroused wonder
long ages back, giving birth to tales of giant
hands that reared them. They have disinterred
relics proving an historic element in old traditions,
and a nucleus of fact beneath the encrustation
of fable over famous names. Like the Empress
Helena, who, in searching for the True Cross, of
course found that for which she looked, Schlie-
mann too readily assumed that he had discovered
the bones of Agamemnon, and the cup from which
Nestor drank. But he brought to light the relics
of a culture, knowledge of which involves neither
more nor less than the rewriting of the history of
man in the Eastern Mediterranean, and, by conse-
quence, in Western Europe.

Dealing, as the limits of the subject compel,
only with the traces of inscriptions on remains
from Mycenae itself, the earliest to be noted is a
stone pestle with one incised character which re-
sembles a Cypriote sign. But one sign does not
make an alphabet, and hence the satisfaction at
the recent discovery of the handle of a stone vase,
apparently of a local material, which has four or

l66 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

five signs engraved upon it, and of the handle of
a clay amphora from a chambered tomb in the
lower town of Mycenae with three characters,
while a tomb at Prousia, near Nauplia, yielded a

genuine Myce-
naean vessel
withthreeears,
on each of
which is grav-
en a sign re-
sembling the

Fig. 63. — Signs on vase-handle i Mycenje). Cj r e e K H.

These may not
suffice to demonstrate the existence of a pre-Phoe-
nician system of writing in Greece, but, taken in
conjunction with the numerous discoveries of in-
scribed signs in Crete, they go far in support of
it. What, then, are the facts as thus far ascer-
tained ?

There have been discovered in Crete a num-
ber of objects bearing
JL . . two sorts of writing,

^^^^y /| K / o"^ hieroglyphic or
//*^ /\ \\/ pictographic; theoth-
/ / / X I / /\ er linear and approach-
' I \/ \ ing the alphabetic.

•cr. (^ c- T, u The pictographic is

Fig. 09. — Signs on amphora-nan- }^ c \

die (Mycena). the older 01 the two,

dating from the earlier
part of the third millennium before Christ. It was
probably derived from a primitive picture-writing
by the non-Hellenic inhabitants of the island, who
were called Eteocretans, or " true Cretans," by
the Dorians, whose invasion dates, according to
the traditional Greek chronology, from about the
middle of the twelfth century 13. c. These " true

THE CRETAN AND ALLIED SCRIPTS. 167

Cretans" may not, however, be the aboriginal in-
habitants, although as to this, and as to their lan-
guage, we are in ignorance. The recent discov-
ery of an uiscription in an unknown language,
written in archaic Greek characters, among the
ruins of Prcesos, the chief Eteocretan settlement,
warrants the inference that the old script of the
language had been abandoned for the Greek alpha-
bet. That script, the use of which never passed
outside the island, obviously had no influence on
Mycenrean civilization.

The linear system is syllabic ; perhaps, in some
degree, alphabetic. Its possible derivation from
the hieroglyphic has been indicated, but although
it is a conventionalised form of pictograph, Dr.
Tsountas is positive in denying its connection
with the Eteocretan. He suggests that its sim-
plification took place in the East, and among a
people or peoples not Greek. Thence it was car-
ried into Greek lands, spreading more in the
islands, at least in Crete, than in the Peloponne-
sus or other portions of the mainland, where, as
shown above, the number of inscribed objects is
exceedingly small. The question is far from ripe
for solution, but Professor Flinders Petrie, with
whom lies a large share of honour in contributing
towards a settlement, courteously permits me to
quote the following from a letter on the subject,
dated 2nd September, 1899 : "A great signary (not
hieroglyphic, but geometric in appearance, if not
in origin) was in use all over the Mediterranean
5000 B.C. It is actually found in Egypt at that
period, and was split in two. Western and East-
ern, by the cross flux of hieroglyphic systems in
Egypt and among the Hittites. This linear sig-
nary was developed variously, but retained much

1 68 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

in common in different countries. It was first
systematised by the numerical values assigned to
it by Phoenician traders, who carried it into Greece,
whereby the Greek signary was delimited into an
alphabet. But the fuller form of the signary sur-
vived in Karia with thirty-si.x signs, and seven
more in Iberia, thus giving values to forty-three.
This connection of the Iberian with the Karian is
striking; so is that of the Egyptian with the West
rather than with the East. Signs found in Egypt
have thirteen in common with the early Arabian,
fifteen in common with Phoenician, and thirty-
three in common with Karian and Kelt-Iberian.
This stamps the Egyptian signary of the twelfth
and eighteenth dynasties as closely linked with
the other Mediterranean systems." In an impor-
tant paper read at the meeting of the British Asso-
ciation, 1899, Professor Flinders Petrie remarks:
"We stand therefore now in an entirely new posi-
tion as to the sources of the alphabet, and we see
them to be about thrice as old as had been sup-
posed. That the signs were used for written
communications of spelled-out words in the early
stages, or as an alphabet, is far from probable. It
was a body of signs, with more or less generally
understood meanings; and the change of attrib-
uting a single letter value to each, and only using
signs for sounds to be built into words, is appar-
ently a relatively late outcome of the systematis-
fng due to Phoenician commerce." {Jo. Atithrop.
Inst., Aug.-Nov., 1899, p. 205.)

Connecting the results of explorations in Asia
Minor, Egypt, Crete, Cyprus, Rhodes, Thera, Me-
los, and other islands of the Eastern Mediterra-
nean with those in the Peloponnesus, the existence
of a pre-Phoenician civilisation, of which Mycenae

THE CRETAN AND ALLIED SCRIPTS. 169

may be conveniently regarded as the centre, ap-
pears to be demonstrated.

That civiHsation, so far as its connection with
the prehistoric stages of man's development goes,
falls in, like aught else in this wide and ancient
world, with the doctrine of contmuity, but for
purposes of time-reckoning dates at latest far
back in the third millennium before our era. My-
cenaean vases have been found in Egypt, and
Egyptian scarabs in Mycenaean deposits. They
prove an intimate intercourse between the two
countries two thousand five hundred years before
Christ. And there was intercourse farther afield.
The imitations of Babylonian cylinders, the sculp-
tured palms and lions, the figures of Astarte and
her doves, show that fifteen hundred years before
the date ascribed to the Homeric poems Assyria
and Greece had come into contact. But the ex-
amples of Oriental art which had found their way
to the soil of Argolis remained more or less exotic,
the independent features of Mycenaean art being
retained unaltered. Now the cumulative effect of
this evidence, which is only baldly summarised
here, is to shatter to pieces current theories as to
the Phoenician origin of European civilisation,
and, consequently, what mainly concerns us here,
of the Phoenician origin of the European alpha-
bets through the Egyptian hieratic. For th&t
evidence shows that the Mycenaean civilisation
is (i) earlier in time, and (2) indigenous in char-
acter.

(i) The evidence as to priority can be sum-
marily stated. Civilisation in the ^gean and on
the Greek mainland dates from beyond 3000 B.C.,
and reached its meridian between the sixteenth
and the twelfth centuries of that era. Almost all

179 "^HE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

that we know about the Phoenicians is at second-
hand, since, 'if they ever had a literature or native
chronicles, these have not survived. Piecing to-
gether classical tradition and references in Egyp-
tian and Hebrew records, we gather that for some
three centuries onwards from 1600 B.C. Phoenicia
was a dependency of the Pharaohs. There was a
Tyrian quarter at Memphis 1250 B.C. Hiram ap"^
pears to fiave refounded Tyre 1028 B.C., from
which time its commercial importance dates; while
the refounding of its future great rival Carthage
is assigned to the early years of the eighth cen-
tury B.C. The decay of the Mycenaean civilisa-
tion, which followed as one of the many results
of the Dorian invasion in the twelfth century B.C.,
gave the Phoenicians their chance. They overran
the ^-Egean, and remained the dominant power in
the Mediterranean until the Greeks, reviving their
ancient traditions, expelled the PhcEnicians from
their waters, and broke their supremacy when
Tyre was sacked by Alexander the Great, 332 B.C.
Between their rise and fall, their commercial pre-
eminence enabled them to impose upon the Greeks
the alphabet which was the vehicle of preservation
of the intellectual wealth of the Hellenes, and of
all literature that followed theirs. What were the
probable sources of that alphabet will be consid-
ered presently.

(2) After allowing full play for Asian and
Egyptian influences, the fact abides that there was
a well-developed native Mycenaean art. The dec-
oration of the pottery is non-Oriental and non-
Egyptian ; the seaweeds and marine creatures de-
picted are home-products of the island world of
Greece; and where sacred trees and pillars appear,
we have no Semitic element, but the outcome, as

THE CRETAN AND ALLIED SCRIPTS. 17 1

Mr. Evans puts it, of a "religious stage widely
represented on primitive European soil, and no-
where more persistent than in the West." But if
there were stepping-stones between Argolis and
Syria in the islands that lay between, there was
continuous passage on the western side, making
Mycenae a link between East and West. The
breaks formerly assumed between the Old and
the New Stone Ages of prehistoric Europe have
been filled up by the accumulation of evidence as
to man's continuous tenure of that continent since
his primitive ancestors crossed thither by now
vanished land-routes from Northern Africa. In
like manner the Mirage Orientale, as M. Salomon
Reinach happily terms it, of a metal-introducing
people from the East, who, in successive racial
waves, swept the older settlers before them into
the remotest corners of the north-west, has van-
ished. When once peopled, Europe, like Asia and
America, ran on independent lines of develop-
ment, which, however, were not isolated from
connecting lines approaching from the East. The
striking facts of the use of common trade-signs
along both shores of the Mediterranean, and of
the existence of remains of Mycenaean monuments
in Sardinia, are in keeping with other facts, show-
ing how close was the contact between one part
of Europe and another centuries before the Phoe-
nicians had left the shores of the Persian Gulf for
the Syrian seaboard. They prepare us for ac-
ceptance of the new theory of " an /Egean culture
rising in the midst of a vast province extending
from Switzerland and Northern Italy through the
Danubian basin and the Balkan peninsula, and
continued through a large part of Anatolia, till it
finally reaches Cyprus." (Evans, Address, Brit.

172 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

Assoc; Nature, ist Oct. 1896, p. 529.) They
prepare us for the fact that in the Bronze Age, if
Scandinavia and its borderlands were the source
of amber, the supply of gold for Northern and
Central Europe was drawn not from the Ural,
but from Ireland.

The centre whence this " .•Egean " culture is
held to have been diffused is denoted by its name.
That name, however, covers the Eastern Medi-
terranean region, and the question arises whether
or not some precise place in that area can be
indicated as the cradleland. " Hellas," says
Herodotus, " was formerly called Pelasgi.x " (ii.
56), and this pre-Hellenic Greece was inhabited
by Barbarians or Pelasgians, as they are, with
equal vagueness, called. There were " Pelas-
gians " on the mainland and the islands ; " the
whole of Peloponnesus took the name of Pelasgia;
the kings of Tiryns were Pelasgians, and ^Eschy-
lus calls Argos a Pelasgian city ; Pausanias (viii.
4, 6) says that the Arcadians spoke of Pelasgus
as the first man who lived in that country, where-
fore, in his reign, it was called Pelasgia ; an old
wall at Athens was attributed to the Pelasgians,
and the people of Attica had from all time been
so called. Lesbos also was called Pelasgia, and
Homer knew of Pelasgians in the Troad. Their
settlements are further traced to Egypt, to
Rhodes, Cyprus, Epirus — where Dodona was
their ancient shrine — and, lastly, to various parts
of Italy." (Keane's Alan Past and Present, p.
505.). Herodotus has little to say in favour of
the Barbarians (which he uses as a descriptive
and not a contemptuous term, the name given by
Greeks to all foreigners whose language was not
Greek) ; he speaks of them as rude, of uncouth

THE CRETAN AND ALLIED SCRIPTS. 173

speech, and worshippers of repellent deities.
Wachsmuth, in his " Historical Antiquities of the
Greek," published over sixty years ago, says that
" numerous traditionary accounts, of undoubted
authenticity, describe them as a brave, moral,
and honourable people, which was less a distinct
stock and tribe than a race united by a resem-
blance in manners and the forms of life." Pro-
fessor Keane fitly calls these " remarkable words,"
in view of the recent discoveries in prehistoric
Greece, which warrant us in ascribing to the
Pelasgians the development of culture in the
^gean Sea. But in what island, or on what part
of the mainland ? The important character of
the finds at Mycenae directs quest thither at the
start. The debris of that city, and of her elder-
sister city, Tiryns, have yielded varied relics ot
an ancient culture, from gold-masked skeletons
in vaulted tombs to gorgeously decorated palaces
and Cyclopean ruins of walls and fortresses. But
there are traditions that these Argolic cities are
of later date than Homer's " great city of Knos-
,sos " in Crete, wherein " Minos, when he was
nine years old, began to rule, he who held con-
verse with the great Zeus, and was the father of
my father, even of Deucalion, high of heart," tra-
ditions pointing to the existence of an important
Cretan kingdom which flourished before Aga-
memnon ruled in Mycense.

Water is the birthplace of civilisation, as of
life itself, and the original home of the yEgean
or Mycenaean civilisation is probably to be found
in the island of Crete. It is crammed with re-
mains of pre-Hellenic culture. It is a big step-
ping-stone from Greece to Asia Minor, Karpathos
and Rhodes lying between. It is in the line of

174 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

communication with Cyprus, Syria, and Egypt on
the East, and with Sicily and the coastlines of
the Western Mediterranean. The earliest Greek '
tradition looks back to Crete " as the home of
divinely inspired legislation and the first centre of
maritime dominion." And, what is of the highest
moment to remember, so far as the origin of the
art of navigation in .'Egean waters goes, there
can be no question between the old claims on
behalf of the Phoenicians and the present claims
on behalf of Crete. The Syrian seaboard is har-
bourless and unsheltered ; the men who first
braved the " unvintaged " " wine dark " waters
(how fine are all the Homeric sea-words) were
island-dwellers, shooting forth from snug creek
and harbour on quick and sudden enterprise, and
growing bolder and bolder as they sailed by the
rising and setting of the stars and the recurring
moon. " The early sea-trade of the inhabitants
of the island world of the .-Egean gave them a
start over their neighbours, and produced a higher
form of culture, which was destined to react on
that of a vast European zone, nay, even upon
that of the older civilisations of Egypt and Asia."
(Evans, Address, B. Assoc, p. 530.) For the
diffusion of culture throughout the .'Egea.n was
followed by expeditions to the East. While
Cyprus yielded the metal to which it has given
its name, the gold of Asia Minor was poured into
the lap of the pre-Hellenes, and moulded into
forms of beauty through which their own artistic
skill challenged comparison with that of the Ori-
ental. In his comment on the source of the
Mycenaean civilisation Mr. Frazer aptly remarks
that " the existence at this early date of a great
maritime power in Crete, which by its central

THE CRETAN AND ALLIED SCRIPTS. 1 75

position between Greece and the empires of the
East was well fitted to receive and amalgamate
the characteristics of both, is just what is needed
to explain the rise and wide diffusion of a type of
civilisation like the Mycenrean, in which Oriental
influences seem to be assimilated and transmuted
by a vigorous and independent nationality en-
dowed with a keen sense of its own for art. The
spade will probably one day decide the question
of priority between Argolis and Crete, but in the
meantime the probability appears to be that the
Mycenaean civilisation rose in Crete and spread
from it as a centre, and that it was not until the
Cretan power was on the wane that the palmy
days of Tiryns and Mycenae began." {Commen-
tary on Pausanias, vol. iii. p. 151.) The Mycenaean
civilisation perished in a great catastrophe. Some-
where near the middle of the twelfth century B.C.
the Dorian invaders in their southward march
reached the walls of Tiryns and Mycenae, and
sacked and gave those cities to the flames. Then
began for Greece " the long dark ages, the mediae-
val epoch, out of which she emerges only in the
Homeric Renaissance." The flower of the sur-
vivors of that dread time sought a new^ home east
of the ^gean on the isles and shores of Ionia.
There these exiles from Argolis laid the founda-
tion of a culture whose influence will abide while
the world stands, because Ionia remains the
fatherland of all who hold dear what man has
reached in art and literature, in science and phi-
losophy.

The fall of Mycence gave Phoenicia her oppor-
tunity, and she was quick to seize it in establish-
ing depots throughout the yEgean, and in secur-
ing the overlordship of the Mediterranean. But
12

176 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

through her lack of political unity, and her de-
pendence on mercenary aid when troubles came,
finally s"he succumbed to the strong arm of the
reinvigorated Greek. Between their rise and de-
cline the Phoenicians had put the alphabet into,
practically, its present form, and secured its adop-
tion by the Greeks. But if they did not derive it
from the Egyptian hieratic, whence came it ?

No definite answer is forthcoming, and per-
haps never will be. Canon Rawlinson is not
alone in thinking that it will probably never be
settled whether the Phoenician characters are
modifications of the Egyptian or the Hittite or of
Cypriote, or mere abbreviated forms of a picture-
writing peculiar to the Phoenicians. That opin-
ion was expressed before the discovery of the
Cretan pictographs and linear signs, and these
have not settled the question. The Phoenicians
came under various influences, and their adaptive
character readily took the impress of their sur-
roundings. Probably they had a long history
before they appear in Syria. As Semites, they
were presumably familiar with cuneiform. The
Tyrian quarter at Memphis was one of many set-
tlements where the Egyptian characters would be
in use, or, at least, familiar. And when the Phoe-
nicians came into the .^-Egean they found an an-
cient script whereby intercourse was facilitated
along the Mediterranean, a script of which so
pliant a people, eager for trade, would avail them-
selves. In view of all these probabilities, Mr.
Evans remarks that it is at least worth while
weighing " the possibility that the rudiments of
the Phoenician writing may after all have come in
part at least from the ^+^gean side. The more
the relics of Mycenaean culture are revealed to

THE CRETAN AND ALLIED SCRIPTS. 177

US, the more we see how far ahead of their neigh-
bours on the Canaanite coasts was the ^gean
population in arts and civilisation." The spread
of their commerce led them to seek plantations
in the Nile Valley and the Mediterranean outlets
of the Arabian and Red Sea trade. The position
was the reverse of that which meets our eye at
a later date. It was not Sidon that was then
planting mercantile settlements on the coasts-tmd
islands of Greece." {Jo. Hellen. Stud., p. 368.)
Whether, /d'r contra, a Semitic element had been
introduced into the yEgean is uncertain, but could
this be proved, the presence of similarities be-
tween the respective scripts would have easy
explanation. Putting together, however, what is
no longer conjectural, it woiild seem that the
Phoenician alphabet was a compound from various
sources, the selection and modification of the sev-
eral characters being ruled by convenience, and
that, primarily and essentially, commercial. Like
all business people immersed in many transac-
tions, their method was brevity, and so they
aimed as near " shorthand " as they could. They
got rid of surplus signs, of the lumber of deter-
minatives and the like, and invented an alphabet
which if it was not perfect (as no alphabet can
be, because the letters are not revised from time
to time to represent changes in sound), was of
such signal value as to have been accepted by
the civilised world of the past, and to have se-
cured, with but slight modifications, a perma-
nence assured to no other invention of the human
race. Therefore, the debt we owe these old trad-
ers is in no wise lessened because the current
theory of derivation of our alphabet is doubted.
This theory as to the nature of the service ren-

178 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

dered by the Phcenicians has corroboration in an
ancient Cretan tradition recorded by Diodoros, a
contemporary of Julius Ca;sar and Augustus, to
which Mr. Evans makes reference in the reprint
of his essay. According to that tradition, the
Phoenicians had not invented written characters,
but had simply " changed their shapes." In other
words, they had not done more than improve on
an existing system, which is precisely what recent
evidence goes to show. " We may infer from
the Cretan contention recorded by Diodoros that
the Cretans claimed to have been in possession of
a system of writing before the introduction of
the Phoenician alphabet. The present discovery
on Cretan soil both of a pictographic and a linear
script dating from times anterior to any known
Phoenician contact thus affords an interesting
corroboration of this little regarded record of an
ancient writer." {Cretan Pictographs, p. 372.)

CHAPTER X.

GREEK PAPYRI.

The Greeks succeeded to the sovereignty of
the sea after they had driven the Phoenicians
from the yEgean. They were skilful shipbuilders
and navigators, and their maritime enterprise,
in which, as has been shown, they preceded the
Phoenicians, took a new lease of life from the
eighth century b.c. Their factories and colonies
were planted from east to west, from Odessa to
Marseilles, where, as their farthermost point, we
find them settled 600 b.c. The assistance given

GREEK PAPYRI. I 79

by lonians and Carians to Psammetichus, the
first king of the twenty-sixth dynasty (666 B.C.)
in his war with the Assyrians was rewarded by the
assignment of permanent settlements in Egypt,
and in the reign of his son, Necho 11., the cities
of Sais and Naucratis (about both of which He-
rodotus has much to say, ii. 97, 135, 169, 178, &c.)
were full of Greek colonists, to whose commercial
and intellectual activity the then prosperous state
of Egypt was mainly due. The footing which
they obtained there was secured when, three hun-
dred years later, Alexander the Great marked his
conquest in the founding of the city which bears
his name. It is well to keep these facts in mind,
because in our assessment of the debt of the civ-
ilised world to Greece we are apt to forget that
it was not wholly intellectual, but also social and
■ndustrial. And these facts have bearing on our
immediate subject in explaining the spread of the
Greek alphabet, or, more precisely, the Western
or Chalcidian form of it, whence the Latin, and
through it the alphabets of Europe and America,
are derived. Although the name was limited to
the districts in the south of Italy, in the larger
sense of the term Graecia Major corresponds to
Greater Britain. As with the area of our home
islands compared with that of our colonies, so
was it with Hellas and her expansion along the
sea whose waters laved the coasts of the civilised
world. And the spread of the English language
and the English alphabet over half the civilised
globe may be compared with " the diffusion of
Hellenic culture and Hellenic scripts throughout
the Mediterranean region, originating in the pre-
Christian centuries various derived alphabets —
Iberian, Gaulish, Etruscan, Latin, and Runic^

l8o THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

followed at a later time by the Maeso-Gothic,
Albanian, &c." (Taylor, ii. 125.)

Palaeography, or the decipherment of docu-
ments, and Epigraphy, or the decipherment of
inscriptions, have been indispensable keys to the
history of the alphabet. But the materials with
which each has to deal would demand a volume,
and, moreover, reference to them here has war-
rant only in their immediate bearings on the de-
velopment and diffusion of alphabets. But, as
with the Papyrus Prisse and the Book of the Dead,
there is a deep interest attaching to some of the
venerable records. They are, in the modern
phrase, and in the best sense of it, " human docu-
ments." Such are the Greek papyri, the oldest-
known specimens of which are found in Egypt,
and have a range of a thousand years, i.e., from
the third century B.C. to the seventh century a.d.,
so that, as Mr. Kenyon remarks in his monograph
on the subject, "we may fairly say that we know
how men wrote in the days of Aristotle and Me-
nander, but we have not yet got back to Pindar
and ^4£schylus, much less to Homer or (if a less
contentious name be preferred) Hesiod." The
use of papyrus as a writing material stretches
back in Egypt to a remote antiquity ; but we can-
not be certain that it was used by the Greeks be-
fore the early part of the fifth century B.C., while
"with the Arab conquest of Egypt (640 a.d.) the
practice of Greek writing on papyrus received its
death-blow." By far the larger number of docu-
ments thus far discovered are non-literary, deal-
ing with official and commercial matters, as tax-
collectors' receipts (although many of these are
scratched on potsherds, or ostraca, literally " oyster
shells," whence ostracize, the inscribing of the name

GREEK PAPYRI. l8i

of a person obnoxious to the state on a shell),
acknowledgments of repayment of dowry after
divorce, wills, reports of public physicians on au-
topsy, house-keeping bills, surety deeds, registra-
tion of title to inheritance, wedding and dinner
invitations, of which last here is an example eight-
een hundred years old : "Chairon requests your
company at dinner at the table of Lord Serapis
in the Serapaeum to-morrow, the 15th, at 9 o'clock "
(i.e. about 3 p.m.). Then there are domestic let-
ters, one, touching human hearts across the cen-
turies, from a father to his son: "Tell me any-
thing I can do for you. Good-bye, my boy";
and another crudely written, and with faulty spell-
ing and grammar, from a boy to his father. " The-
on to his father Theon, greeting: It was a fine
thing of you not to take me with you to Alexan-
dria. I won't write a letter or speak to you, or
say good-bye to you, and if you go to Alexandria
I won't take your hand, nor ever greet you again.
That is what will happen if you won't take me.
. . . Send me a lyre, 1 implore you ; if you don't,
I won't eat, I won't drink. There, now ! "

The first discovery of Greek papyri was made
at Herculaneum in 1752. They consist of above
eighteen hundred charred rolls, which were en-
closed in a wooden cabinet, and doubtless formed
a portion of the library of one Lucius Piso Cseso-
nius, in the ruins of whose villa they were found.
The condition of the papyri made the unrolling
and decipherment of them a very tedious opera-
tion, and the work is not even yet completed.
" They are written in small uncial letters, and
possess little beyond palaeographic value, com-
prising worthless treatises on physics, music,
rhetoric, and kindred subjects by Philodemus and

t82 the story of the alphabet.

other third-rale philosophers of the Epicurean
school." A quarter of a century later some rolls
of papyrus were found in Egypt, probably in the
Fayum. Of these only one, containing a list of
peasants employed in the corvee, survived de-
struction by the natives, and it was not till 1820
that the discovery of a number of rolls on the
site of the Serapeum at Memphis supplied the
key to knowledge of Greek writing of the second
century B.C. Since then, at varying intervals,
the finds have increased in number and impor-
tance. The earliest known examples, dating from
the third century b.c, were discovered by Pro-
fessor Flinders Petrie in 1889 in a number of
mummy cases at Gurob. Most of these papyri
were non-literary — wills, petitions, and such-like
documents — but two valuable relics came to light
in fragments of Plato's " Phaedo " and the lost
" Antiope'' of Euripides. Then followed the dis-
covery of another lost work, Aristotle's 'AOrjvaLOJv
IIoAtreta; of the " Mimes " of Herodas — an almost
unknown writer of the Alexandrian age — part of
another oration of Hyperides; a long medical
treatise, and fragments of Homer, Demosthenes,
and Isocrates. The " Mimes," two thousand years
old, are as young as yesterday. "Though," Mr.
Whibley remarks in a charming paper upon these
recovered treasures, "they have survived the
searching test of time, they have been unseen of
mortal eyes for countless centuries. The emo-
tions which Herodas delineates are not Greek,
but human, and no preliminary cramming in
archaeology is necessary for their appreciation.
As the world was never young, so it will never
grow old. The archaeologist devotes years of re-
search to compiling a picture of Greek life, and

GREEK PAPYRI. I 83

the result is Charicles — a cold and unrelieved mass
of ' local colour.' There is no proportion, no at-
mosphere, no background ; all is false save the
details, and they merely overload the canvas.
Herodas presents not a picture, but an impres-
sion, and one mime reveals more of life as it was
lived two thousand years ago, than the complete
works of Becker, Ebers, and the archaeologists."
{^Nineteenth Century, Nov. 1891, p. 748.) Here is
one scene by which Mr. Whibley justifies his ap-
preciation. The dramatis personce are Metriche, a
grass-widow ; Threissa, her maid ; and Gyllis, an
old lady.

Metriche. Threissa, there is a knock at the door ; go and
see if it is a visitor from the country.

Threissa Please push the door. Who are you that are
afraid to come in ?

Gyllis. All right, you see, I am coming in.

Threissa. What name shall I say ?

Gyllis. Gyllis, the mother of Philainis. Go indoors, and
announce me to Metriche.

7 kreissa. A caller, ma'am.

Metriche. What, Gyllis, dear old Gyllis! Turn the chair
round a little, girl. What fate induced you to come and see
me, Gyllis ? An angel's visit, indeed ! Why, I believe its five
months since any one dreamt of your knocking at my door.

Gyllis. I live such a long way off, and the mud in the lane
is up to your knees. 1 am ever anxious to come, for old age is
heavy upon me, and the shadow of death is at my side.

Metriche. Cheer up ! don't malign Father Time ; old age
is wont to lay his hand on others too.

Gyllis. Joke away ; though young women can find some-
thing better to do than that. But, my dear girl, what a long
time you've been a widow ! It's ten months since Mandris
was despatched to Egypt, and he hasn't sent you a single line ;
doubtless he has forgotten you, and is drinking at a new spring ;
for in Egypt you may find all things that are or ever were —
wealth, athletics, power, fine weather, glory, goddesses, philoso-
phers, gold, handsome youths, the shrine of the god and god-
dess, the most excellent king, the finest museum in the world,

184 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

wine, all the good things you can desire, and women, by Per-
sephone, countless as the stones and beautiful as the goddesses
that appealed to Paris.

Metriche protests, and Gyllis, suggesting that
Mandris is dead, reveals tiie purpose of her visit.

Now listen to the news I have brought you after this long
time. You know Gyllis, the son of Matachene, who was such
a famous athlete at school, got a couple of blues at his univer-
sity, and is now amateur champion bruiser ? Then he is so
rich, and he leads the quietest life ; see, here is his signet-ring.
Well, he saw you the other day in the street, and was smitten
to the heart- And, my dear girl, he never leaves my house
day or night, but bemoans his fate, and calls upon your name ;
he is positively dying of love.

Metriche becomes righteously indignant when
Gyllis suggests that she return his love.

By the fates, Gyllis, your white hairs blunt your reason.
There is no cause yet to deplore the fate of Mandris. By
Demeter, I shouldn't like to have heard this from another
woman's lips. And you, my dear, never come to my house
with such proposals again. For none may make mock of
Mandris. . . . But, if what the world says be true, I needn't
speak to Gyllis like this. Threissa, let us have some refresh-
ments ; bring the decanter and some water, and give the lady
something to drink. Now, Gyllis, drink, and show that you
aren't angry.

And so with delightful interchange of civilities
the quarrel is brought to an end.

Passing by other discoveries, some of these in-
cluding fragments of a play by Menander, of
whose hundred comedies none are perfect, we
come to the thousands of Greek papyri found in
1796-97 by Messrs. Grenfell and Hunt on the site
of the ancient Oxyrhynchus, the capital of a nome
of Middle Egypt. The full list of these relics has
not yet been published, and it will take some years
to decipher them all ; but among the literary por-

GREEK PAPYRI. 185

tion are fragments of works known and unknown.
Among the latter is a papyrus of the second cen-
tury, containing a collection of Login, or Sayings,
of Jesus Christ, some of which are familiar, whilst
others are wholly new. The following translation
of these, made by the Rev. A. C. Headlam, is
based on the texts as provisionally settled by Pro-
fessors Lock and Sanday.

1. (Jesus saith, Cast out first the beam out of thine own eye),
and then shalt thou see to cast out the mote in thy brother's eye.

2. Jesus saith, Except ye fast to the world, ye shall not find
the kingdom of God ; and unless ye keep the true Sabbath, ye
shall not see the Father.

3. 4. Jesus saith, I stood in the midst of the world, and in
my flesh I was seen of them, and I found all men drunken,
not one found I thirsty among them ; and my soul is weary
for the sons of men, for they are blind in their heart, and see
(not, poor and know not) their poverty.

5. Jesus saith. Wherever there be (two, they are not with-
out) God, and if anywhere there be one. I am with him ;
raise the stone and there thou shalt find me ; cleave the wood,
and there am I.

6. Jesus saith, A prophet is not received in his own country,
nor doth a physician heal his neighbours.

7. Jesus saith, A city built on the summit of a lofty moun-
tain, and firmly established, cannot fall nor be hidden.

8. Jesus saith. Thou hearest with (one ear), but the other
hast thou closed.

Discoveries of this sort bring with them temp-
tation to dwell on their significance, but that
must be resisted. There is also temptation to
refer to other materials bearing on the history of
the Greek alphabet — notably to the inscriptions
on the stupendous statue at Abu Simbel, near
the second cataract of the Nile- — the mere abstract
of which w^ould fill this little volume. But the
excerpts — varied enough — already given will suf-
fice to indicate what wealth of literature for our
knowledge of the past the venerable relics yield.

1 86

THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

and how poor beyond redemption would the
world be if shorn of those records of human
thought and feeling, of those grave and gay pic-
tures of life, so closely resembling our own,
whereby, too, we learn how superficial have been
the changes in human nature throughout the ages
of man's tenancy of the earth.

In the remaining pages the course of the his-
tory of the Phoenician alphabet, as we may for
convenience still call it, must now be outlined,
and for this purpose the following table, an ab-

Hebrew.

Syriac.

Mongolian

S S

Arabic.

Pehlevi.

Armenian.

Georgian.

Ethiopic

. Amharic.

Burmese.

Siamese.

Ij y

Javanese.

Singalese.

Corean.

Tibetan.

Kashmiri.

Gujarati.

Marathi.

Bengali.
Malayan.

' Tamil.

Telugu.

I a =

Canarese.

Greek.

Latin.

d '

Russian.

Coptic.

GREEK PAPYRI. 1 87

stract of that given in Canon Isaac Taylor's His-
tory of the Alphabet (i. 81), is a convenient guide.
The several alphabets, it will be seen, are
grouped under three principal heads: {a) Ara-
MEAN, whence most of the alphabets of Western
Asia are derived; {b) Sab/Ean, the source of the
alphabets of India; and {c) Hellenic, the source
of the alphabets of Europe.

{a) Aramean, so-called from "Aram," the
hilly district of Mesopotamia, became, from the
seventh century b.c, the commercial script pf
Asia, Aram lying in the line of trade between
Egypt and Babylonia. Later on that script was
used for official purposes at the Babylonian court;
and " ultimately broke up into a number of na-
tional alphabets, for which, owing to religious
causes, a separate existence became possible.
The later alphabets — Parsi, Hebrew, Syriac, Mon-
golian, and Arabic — were at first local varieties
of the Aramean. Owing to accidental circum-
stances they became the sacred scripts of five
great faiths of Asia — Zoroastrianism, Judaism,
Christianity, Northern Buddhism, and Islam.
Hence the descendants of the Aramean alphabet
occupy a space on the map second only to that
filled by the Latin alphabet itself." (Taylor, i.
249.) They are, as indicated in the table: (i)
the Hebrew, in whose modern square characters
copies of the Scriptures in that language are
printed, and the rolls of the Law inscribed ; (2)
the Synac, once an important script of Christian
literature, but now only in use among some ob-
scure sects ; (3) the Afongolian, which has a curious
history, narrated at length in Canon Taylor's vol-
umes (i. pp. 297-312). It is derived from the

^88 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET,

Syriac, which was carried by Nestorian missiona-
ries throughout Asia. Condemned by the Coun-
cil of Ephesus in 431 a.d. for certain heresies
concerning the dual nature of Christ, these Nes-
torians fled to Persia, and thence travelling east-
ward, preached their gospel with such success
that the alphabet in which it was written became
the dominant script until its supersession by Arabic
on the spread of Mohammedanism. (4) The his-
tory of Arabic, which is more nearly allied to
Syriac than to any other member of the Aramean
group, exhibits the aggressive spirit of the Prophet,
whose scriptures are transcribed in its beautiful
flowing characters. It has exterminated its fellow-
Semitic scripts, " expelled the Greek alphabet from
Asia Minor, Thrace, Syria, and Egypt, and the
Latin alphabet from Northern Africa, and is now
uaed over regions inhabited by more than one
hundred millions of the human race." The trans-
actions of the East are recorded in the alphabet
of the Koran, so that it would seem, in the world's
history, that if " trade follows the flag," the alpha-
'bet follows religion.

The so-called "Arabic" numerals are prob-
ably of Indian origin, having been brought by
Arab traders from the East and introduced by
them into Spain in the Middle Ages, whence they
spread over Europe, coming into use in England
perhaps about the eleventh century. But whether
India invented them, or borrowed them from
Greek or other traders from the West, is un-
known. Counting with the fingers, the most
primitive mode of reckoning, and recording by
strokes, a method still in vogue, have their limits,
and hence (to say nothing of the use of pebbles
and beans, and of the abacus) the invention of

GREEK PAPYRI. 1S9

written signs for the higher numbers; or the
adoption of the letters of the alphabet in their
order as number-signs, the numerical value in-
creasing with each successive letter; or the use
of the initial letter of the word itself for the num-
ber. Examples of special symbols for tens, hun-
dreds, and so forth are supplied by Egyptian and
Assyrian records, as shown in the following fig-
ures : —

1=1 111111111=9 n=io niiiii = i5 nn=20

C — 100 1 = 1000 1=10,000

inicennniiii= — 4434

EGYPTIAN NUMERATION.

| = l<-IO I" 100 <I — (IOX100) = IOGO

iiiKi^j;ji^«<nn— 4434

ASSYRIAN NUMERATION.

We have examples of the use of letters in
their " abecedarian " or acrostic order in the sec-
tions of the one hundred and nineteenth and one
hundred and forty-fifth Psalms, which bear the
letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and in the books
of the "Iliad," which bear the letters of the
Greek alphabet. That alphabet also supplies
illustration of the acrologic method, as ^.^.
U = Il€VT€, for 5; A^AeVa, for lo; H (the old
sign for the rough breathing in^EKarov), for loo ;
X=XtA.iot, for looo; 11 with A (=5 X lo) in-
scribed in it standing for 50. A more ingenious
method was adopted by both Greeks and Hebrews
in the division of the alphabet into three groups :
the first to represent units; the second, tens;

190 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

and the third, hundreds. The use of " Arabic "
numerals, besides encountering opposition at the
start, was limited until the fifteenth century to
the paging of books and mathematical formulae,
• but their convenience as compared with the cum-
brous Roman figures won them general adoption.
Their stages of modification were pictorially sug-
gested by Canon Taylor in a communication to
the Academy 28th January 1882, from which the
table on p, 191 is borrowed, but the question of
origin remains unsettled.

An age to which, more than to its predecessors,
with their more sedate lives, " time is rhoney,"
may appreciate what service they wrought who
invented the few numerals the relative places of
which serve the purpose of recording the com-
merce of the world. But perhaps the greater
admiration is due to the genius which devised
the nought or cipher (Arab, sifr, " empty "), with-
out which the labour of calculation and recording
would have taxed energy beyond endurance.

The (5) Fehlevi, (6) Armenian, and (7) Georgian
alphabets are derived from the Aramean group
through the Persian or Iranian. The Pehlevi has
abiding interest as the script of the sacred books
of the Zend or Parsi religion ; but the Armenian
and Georgian, with the addition of three or four
Greek letters, are bereft of significance except as
the surviving representatives of the ancient Per-
sian. The Indo-Bactrian alphabet should have
reference here as of Iranian descent, and espe-
cially because it is the script of the famous edicts
of Asoka, the first royal Buddhist convert, in-
scribed on a rock near Peshawar.

(^) The Sab^an (from " Sheba ") or Himya-
ritic (from Himyar, the eponymous hero of the

GREEK PAPYRI.

191

Himyarites) group is classed among South Se-
mitic alphabets. The early alphabet of Abyssinia,

The Arabic Ciphers.

European. Gobar,

(Arab.).

Indian.

5th c ist c

.^>

¥
h

Letters of the

Indo-Iiactrian

Alphabet. .^

and and ist cent.

B.C.

(Sui;fgested
prototypes.)

called Ethiopic or Amharic, is derived from it,
and, wherein lies its main importance, also the
13

192 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

alphabets of India, the number of which, compris-
ing more than half of the alphabets now in use,
would, in detailed treatment, "demand a space
wholly disproportionate to any interest which
they might possess save to an extremely limited
band of specialists." That is Canon Taylor's
excuse for passing them over with brevity, and
those who care to pursue a subject yielding to
few in dryness will find it summarised in the
tenth chapter of his work. For the present pur-
pose, the list of alphabets set down in the table
will suffice.

(c) The Hellenic. — It was a happy chance
that, in the westward course of the Phoenician
alphabet, the Greeks were the first to receive it.
For while the various scripts of Asia and the
Malayan Archipelago, which are derived from
that alphabet, have retained, in the main, its con-
sonantal character, leaving the vowels to be only
partially indicated, the Greeks, with master-
touch, shaped it to relative perfection in adding
separate letters to represent the vowels, so that
there might be a visible sign for every audible
sound of the human voice. Besides this, they
put some of the superfluous gutturals and sibilants
to new uses, simplified other characters, and ulti-
mately transposed the Semitic mode of writing
from right to left by writing from left to right.
These, and other changes both in the Greek and
its derived alphabets, were made slowly and al-
most imperceptibly, "descent with modification,"
to apply the Darwinian phrase concerning plants
and animals to the scripts of the world, being
as much a feature in their history as in that of
organisms generally. To complete the parallel,
when a certain stage of adaptation is reached.

GREEK PAPYRI. 193

there is, as e.g. in the case of our own alphabet,
mainly through the invention of printing, arrest
of development. Nature may aim at perfection,
but is content with adjustment, and the works of
man abide only as they are, in Stoic maxim,
"according to nature."

The alphabets derived from the Hellenic are
(i) Greek, (2) jRussiati, (3) Coptic, (4) Latin.

(i) Greek. — To the ancient Greek Hellas
meant no defined country, but simply the abode
of the Hellenes, whether in Smyrna, Syracuse,
Athens, or wherever else they might be found.
The mountainous character of Greece explains
its division into a crowd of petty states, many of
which were no bigger than a modern township.
This accorded with Aristotle's view that the area
of the state should not be wider than an orator's
voice would carry. The physical separation of
the peoples explains that political disunion which
was the curse of the country from first to last,
and accounts for the forty local alphabets which
made for discord. But the federation at the time
of the Persian invasion,* when the victories of
Marathon and Salamis fostered conceptions of a
common fatherland, was followed by the rise of
Athens, and her intellectual supremacy determined
that of one of the alphabets. These had settled
into two leading groups, the Ionian (in which the
Corinthian may be included) and the Chalcidian.
The Ionian, which was developed in the famous
colony of that name, deviated more from the Phoe-
nician type than the Chalcidian. It was adopted
by Athens 483 B.C., and became the classic alpha-
bet of Greece. From it there sprang the Slavonic,
Coptic, and other alphabets, while the Chalcidian
gave birth to the alphabets of Western Europe.

194 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

(2) Russian. — A quaint and probably trust-
worthy tradition tells how the Greek alphabet
was imported into Russia. " Formerly," says
John, E.\arch of Bulgaria, who wrote in the ninth
century, "the Slavonians had no books, but they
read and made divinations by means of pictures
and figures cut on wood, being pagans. After
they had received baptism they were compelled,
without any proper rules, to write their Slavonic
tongue by means of Greek and Latin letters.
But how could they write well in Greek letters
such words as Bog, Zhivot, Zelo, or Tserkov,
and others like these ? And so many years passed
by. But then God, loving the human race, had
pity on the Slavonians, and sent them St. Con-
stantine, the Philosopher, called Cyril, a just and
true man, who made for them an alphabet of
thirty-eight letters, of which some were after the
Greek style, and some after the Slavonic Ian--
guage."' The variety of sounds in Slavonic in-
volved the addition of ten characters to Cyril's
alphabet, and although that number was after-
wards reduced, the Russian remains the most
cumbersome and ungainly of alphabets.

(3) Coptic, or, more correctly, the Coptic script
of Egypt under the Romans. Notwithstanding
the advent of Caesar Augustus as Prefect of
Egypt, Greek influence prevailed, and the native
Christians, in transcribing the Coptic version of
the Bible, used the Greek alphabet, borrowing
some half-dozen of the ancient Egyptian de-
motic signs to express sounds unrepresented
by the Greek. But, as throughout Mohamme-
dan countries, Arabic has supplanted Coptic,
which is now used only for liturgical purposes,
"perhaps little if at all understood by the priests

GREEK PAPYRI. 195

who have to use it in the services of tfce
Church."

(4) Latin. — This is, far and away, the most
important of all alphabets. As stated above, it
is derived from the Chalcidian type of the Hel-
lenic, so called because in use at Chalcis, in
a'Eubfea, an island of the ^gean, whence migrated
one of the several Greek colonies planted in
Southern Italy. As the oldest Italic scripts —
copying the older method of the Greek — read
from right to left, and as the first thing aimed at
by the colonists would be the use of common
sound-signs and numerals, there is good warrant
for fixing the date of the introduction of the
Greek alphabet into Italy at about the eighth
century before Christ. The various derived
scripts — Umbrian, Oscan, Etruscan, and others —
have all, the Latin alone excepted, passed away.
The ultimate dominance of the Latins brought
about the abolition of every other alphabet than
their own, which, becoming the alphabet of the
Roman Empire, and then of Christendom, secured
an everlasting supremacy. It was the vehicle of
Greek and Roman culture to Western Europe;
it is the vehicle of all the culture of the pro-
gressive races of the world. Although essen-
tially identical with the Greek, it took its own
line, and that, compared with the Slavonic, a sim-
ple one. The earliest Indo-European or " Aryan "
language contained, so far as can be discovered^
twelve consonants and three vowels (/', a, li), and
to these last the Latin added e and o. It at first
rejected the Greek K, and used C for the sound>
of both k and ^, but later on added a bar to the
lower end of C, converting it into G. Similarly,
R IS but a variation of P, by the addition of a

196 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

Stroke below the crook. And while the later
Greek rejected Q, the Latin retained it. But not
to multiply examples, citations of which are con-
fusing in the absence of explanations of the
causes necessitating changes of form, explana-
tions too technical for admission here (see for
examples Taylor, ii. 140), it may suffice to give a
few specimens of variations between the older
and newer Latin and Greek forms.

In the early empire the Romans used two
sorts of characters, Capital and Cursive. The
Capitals were square-shaped or rustic, i.e. slight-
ly ornamented. They were used for inscriptions
and other writing demanding prominence, as we
use capitals nowadays, borrowing the old Roman
forms. The Cursive or running characters are
the originals of our small types, and were used
for correspondence and other purposes where
rapid writing was an object, abbreviations, which
are the forerunners of our modern "short-hand,"
being sometimes employed. Out of this cursive
hand there arose a variety of hand-writings, the
most important among these being the Irish " semi-
uncial." The appearance of this script in that
island is one of the problems of graphiology.
"No Irish hand is known out of which it could
have arisen. And yet in the sixth century Ire-
land suddenly becomes the chief school of West-
ern calligraphy, and the so-called Irish uncial
blazes forth in full splendour as the most mag-
nificent of all medireval scripts. Only one conclu-
sion seems possible. Some time in the fifth cen-
tury a fully-formed book-hand must have been in-
troduced by St. Patrick (432-458 a.d.), doubtless
from Gaul, where he received his consecration.
And this must have been cultivated as a calli-

GREEK PAPYRI.

197

graphic script in the Irish monasteries, which at
this time enjoyed comparative immunity from the
ravages of the Teutonic invaders, who, in the fifth
century, desolated Italy, Gaul, and Spain." (Tay-
lor, ii. 173.) Irish monks introduced it into North-
umbria, and in course of time there was derived

Classical
Latin.

01a

Lalin.

OM
Greek.

Classical
Greek.

< (

> >

^^K^>^

p p

k ^

S i X

X + i

FINAL LATIN AND GREEK FORMS COMPARED WITH THEIR PRO-
TOTYPES IN THE OLDER ALPHABETS.

from it the "Caroline minuscule," as it is called,
because it was introduced in the reign of Charle-
magne in the famous school at Tours founded by
Alcuin of York, a celebrated scholar of the eighth
century, and friend of the Emperor. As a clear
hand, compressible into a small space, it grew

198 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

rapidly in favour till the end of the twelfth cen-
tury, when a period of decadence, of which the
ugly " Black Letter " was the result, set in and
held sway in Western Europe for a generation
after the discovery of printing with movable
types. The Black-letter characters were imita-
tions of the coarse characters of the monkish
manuscripts, and it was not till the early part of
the sixteenth century that they were displaced in
England by the Roman letters, whose basis is
the Caroline minuscule (see p. 34) Here, how-
ever, we are on the threshold of the "chapel,"
and must retrace our steps for brief survey of
the few changes introduced into the Latin alpha-
bet in adapting it to the requirements of the
English language. These are shown in the ad-
mirable table borrowed from Canon Taylor.
(^History of the Alphabet, i. 72.) The order of the
letters (an unexplained problem in the history of
the alphabet) approximates to that of the Phoe-
nicians, and their names are based on the same
principle as that of the Latin. Running our eye
down the table we note that our alphabet pro-
vides for certain phonetic variations by turning
the Latin I into I and J, and VV or UV into
double U = W. The Anglo-Saxon, which appears
to be partly Roman and partly Irish in origin,
had borrowed two useful characters from the
Runic, ]) = w, named 7t'<?;/, and )'>= th, named thorn,
which for a time formed part of the English alpha-
bet. The thorn has been revived of late, as a bas-
tard archaic, in the printing of the as_)'^ with con-
sequent mispronunciation of that word by those
w'ho see it thus changed. Both Y and Z were
late importations from the Greek into the Latin,
being used only in Greek loan-words to denote

GREEK PAPYRI. iq^

GENEALOGY OF THE ENGLISH ALPHABET.

Old Greek

EuUran

LatiD.

rncial.

MinoBcnle-

VenetUn.

Romao.

A a

C
q3

399

Ox)

t)6

e e

t)b

K k

l\.

P P

f»

r r

^ S

r «

r t

f UV
C Y

u v to

u V te

U V w

3 ,

■1

VII

200 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

sounds peculiar to the Greek; hence, as the most
recent arrivals, their appearance at the end of the
alphabet. Some of our letters are of little use;
K makes C superfluous, and Q and X are of no
more service to us than they were to the Romans.
So that, for practical purposes, we have only
twenty-three letters wherewith to indicate at least
thirty-two sounds. Thus our alphabet, like our
spelling (which is ever at war with our pronuncia-
tion, to the bewilderment of school children and
foreigners), is what it is from the lack of any con-
sistent rule. Nevertheless, so workable a set of
signs has secured a footing which, made firmer by
the art of printing, is not likely to be disturbed
by any processes of phonetic change which mark
the course of speech. To that art of printing is
also due those modifications in handwriting which
distinguish the penmanship of past and present
times. As has been seen, while Germany remained
in fetters to the eye-distracting Black Letter, we
freed ourselves by adoption of the clear Roman
type ; hence the disappearance, save in legal
documents and a few show art-books, of the
cramped hand which prevailed down to the six-
teenth century. So the handwriting of to-day
(good, bad, and indifferent, as the personal equa-
tion of each one of us shapes it), which we learned
at school through the stages of " pot-hooks and
hangers" to the grandest flourishes of copy-book
" maxims," is derived from the same source as
the printed alphabet.

RUNES AND OGAMS. 20I

CHAPTER XI.

RUNES AND OGAMS.

The Runic alphabet originated among the
Scandinavians, who probably adapted it from
some other script, since no traces of any picto-
graphic characters whence it may have been de-
rived have been found. Some scholars hold that
it is derived from the " Phoenician " alphabet ;
others say that it comes from the Latin. Canon
Taylor has a definite theory that it is a degraded
form of the Greek alphabet; for in the sixth cen-
tury B.C. the Goths swarmed in the region south
of the Baltic and east of the Vistula, and in their
trading relations with Greek colonists north of
the Black Sea may readily have obtained a knowl-
edge of the Greek alphabet. The question, how-
ever, of origin remains, and is likely to remain,
unsettled.

The sharp, angular form of the runes proves
that they were incised on wood, stone, or some
such rigid material, and these characters persist
in the few manuscripts which have been found.
The primitive Gothic alphabet is named, on the
acrologic principle, " futhorc," after the first six
letters,/, u^ th, o, r, c. It was divided into three
parts or " aetts," named after the first letter of
each "aett" or family — "Frey's aett," " Hagl's
aett," and " Tyr's aett " — as shown in the follow-
ing illustration from an article on Runes by Miss
Gertrude Rawlings {Kno7vledge, i October, 1896).

The Scandinavian, Anglian, and Manx runes
are local variants of this oldest form. Runic in-
scriptions— monumental and sepulchral — have a

202 THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

wide, although exclusive, range. They are found
in the valley of the Danube, but not in Ger-
many; in America, but not in Ireland; in the
Isle of Man, but not in Wales — thus evidencing
their restriction within Scandinavian lines of mi-

9A^^^<x^> u\i<}^^r^ '^ft^M^'<?'M^

rUThORCCW H N I y eOPAS T B £ ML Ng D O
RUNE ALPHABET.

gration. The oldest was found at Sandwich in
Kent ; but an especially interesting example is
the well-known Ruthwell Cross in Dumfriesshire,
on which is inscribed the poem, " The Dream of
the Holy Rood," ascribed to Caedmon, the herds-
man poet of the seventh century. The early
voyage of the Vikings to Vineland, as they named
America, has illustration in a Runic epitaph cut
in a rock on the Potomac. " Here lies Syasi, the
fair one of Western Iceland, the widow of Koldr,
sister of Thorgr, by her father, aged twenty-five
years. God be merciful to her." The old alpha-
bet was displaced by the Latin on the conversion
of the peoples of Northern Europe to Christianity,
but not before Ulphilas, the Bishop of the Goths,
had woven some of its characters into the com-
pound script which was the vehicle of his mem-
orable translation of the Gospels, the lovely
manuscript of which, in gold and silver letters on
purple vellum, is worth a visit to the University
of Upsala to see.

The curious Ogam alphabet, which may date
from the fifth century a.d., and the use of which
did not extend outside the British Isles, is held
by some scholars to be derived from the Runic,
but its characters indicate that more probably it is

RUNES AND OGAMS. 203

a debased copy of the Roman. Ogam, according
to Professor Rhys, the highest authority on the
subject, probably means " skilled use of words."
The letters are formed by straight or slanting
strokes drawn above, or beneath, or right through
horizontal or perpendicular lines. The alphabet
is divided into four aicmes or groups, each con-
taining five letters: the first aicme, b, l, f, s, n,
being placed under the line (assuming this to be
horizontal) ; the second aicme, h, t, d, C, Qn,
above it ; the third aicme, m, g. Kg, f(') r, diag-
onally through it ; and the fourth aicme, com-
prising the vowels a, o, u, e, i, intersecting it at
right angles. Canon Taylor sees in the ogams
an adaptation of the runes to the needs of the
engraver, " notches cut with a knife on the edge
of a squared staff being substituted for the ordi-
nary runes." And he thinks that the derivation
of the ogams from runes is shown in the fact that
their names agree with the names of runes of cor-
responding value, and that they are found exclu-
sively in regions where Scandinavian settlements
were established. Professor Rhys regards them
as " probably the work of a grammarian acquainted
with Roman writing, but too proud to adopt it."
The larger number of Ogam inscriptions occur
in Ireland ; others are scattered over Scotland,
Wales, and the southwest of England.

It may be thought that any survey of the his-
tory of the Alphabet, however free from over-
crowding in detail, and however popular in treat-
ment, would outline the story of the origin of,
and changes in, each of the twenty-six letters
which are, for the English-speaking races, the
vehicle of communication and the depository of
knowledge. But, probably, enough has been said

204

THE STORY OP^ THE ALPHABET.

to show that the information which would alone
warrant such table of derivations is not yet forth-
coming, and, perhaps, never will be. The most
plausible theory that the wit of man, supported by
a set of facts that seemed to hang well together,

could devise, was for-
®r»i««3M«tt8im3m3£«3a«aa«rJW9 mulated by M.de Rouge,
•f Aabcdefghijklmnopq I and it has been Seen that

# rfstuvwxyzS:

^ ABCDEFQHIjKLMNOPQ
S RSTUVWXYZ

a e 1 o u
abeb ibobub
ac ec ic oc uc
ad ed id od ud

a e I o u
babebi bobu
ca ce ci co cu
dadedidodu

i
i

n \^ Heaven, hallowed be thy

2 Name; thy Kingdom come,

X thy Will be done on Earth,

~ as it is in Heaven. Give us

I R Father, which art in

the epigraphic material
found in the yEgean ren-
ders his apparently well-
based and coherent the-
ory no longer tenable.

Neither would there
be advantage in cata-
loguing the two hundred
and fifty alphabets which
have come into being

tf ^\e forgive them that trefpafs 8

S againft us: And lead us not S

B into Temptation, but deliver fi

5 us from Evil. Amen. S

HORN BOOK,

i ^r^'^X^::^ i ^i"ce prehistoric man

scratched his rude pic-
tographs on the faces of
cliffs and on fragments
of slate or bone. Some
fifty of these alphabets

ONCE THE UNIVERSAL PRIMER. h^VC SUrvlvcd, and of

(Nowsoexcesswe/yrare^Aata ^^ ^^ ^ ^alf are

£ood example fetches £,JiO and . t j • i

upwards.) found in India, but,

whatever of historical
value they may hold, their use is restricted and
local. The rest are, in the main, variations of
three scripts — Roman, Arabic, and Chinese — and
an outlook on the world's course makes it no
matter of doubt that it is with the Roman, as the
vehicle of culture of the most advancing races of
mankind, that there lies the maintenance of su-
premacy and the extension of its sway.

INDEX.

Abu Simbel, 185.

Aerology, 79, 94, 139, 189, 201.

yEgean civilisation, 144, 169, 175.

Akerblad, 117- _

Akkadian civilisation, 95.

cuneiform, 91, 154.

religion, 95.

Alaskan life, pictograph of, 59, 60.
Algerian rock-paintings, 31.
Almanack symbolsj 92.
Alphabet, Abyssinian, 191.

Arabic, 188.

Aramean, 186, 187.

Armenian, 190.

birth of the, 112.

Chalcidian, 179, 193, 195.

Coptic, 194.

Corean, 79.

Dravidian, 186.

English, 34, 198, 200.

Ethiopic, igi.

Georgian, 190.

Greek, 123, 192.

Hebrew, 123, 137, 187, 191.

Hellenic, 186, 192.

Indian, 192.

Indo-Bactrian, 190, 191.

Ionian, 193.

Irish, 196.

Latin, 34, 179, 195, 196.

Mongolian, 187.

Ogam, 202.

Pehlevi, 84, 190.

Phoenician, 170, 176, 177, 186,

192.

Pictograph and, 25.

Runic, 198, 201.

Russian, 194.

Sabaean, 190.

Alphabet, Samaritan, 138.

stages of development of, 35,

36.

Syriac, 187.

variations in English, 198.

Amenophis III., 100.

America, development of man in,

68. _
Arabic numerals, 188, 191.
Art, prehistoric. 22, 23.
Asoka, 190.

Assyrian numerals, 189.
Australian aborigines, 25.

grave-posts of, 48.

rock-paintings of, 27.

Ave Maria, 73.
Aztecs, 68.

Baal Lebanon, vessels from, 132,
133-

Babylonian characters, 89, 168.

Babylonians, 95, i,j2, 187.

Bark, picture-writing on, 53, 54, 60,
61.

Behistun rock-inscription, 86, 90,
116, 163.

Belts, wampum, 42-46.

Benefit of clergy, 20.

" Bible," etymology of, 10.

Bible as charm, 18.

Bite, written charm against centi-
pede, 18.

Black letter, 198.

Body, parts of, used for measure-
ments, 92.

" Book," etymology of, 10.

Book 0/ Breathings, 108.

Book 0/ the Dead, 106, 114, 180.

Borchardt, Dr., 105.

Brahma, 16.

205

2o6

THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

Budge, Dr. Wallis, io8, 112, 115,

117, 120.
Burckhardt, 163.
Bushmen rain-charm, 32.
rock-paintings, 28-30.

Cadger's map, 52.

Cadmus, 16.

Caedmon, 202.

Cave-man, art of, 22-24.

Census-roll, Indian, 65.

ChampoUion, 117, 118.

Charms, written, 15, 16, 18, 19, 108.

Chinese characters, 75.

determinatives, 77.

picture-writing, 76, 77, 93.

Clay tablets, 81.

Cleopatra, 118.

Clermont-Ganneau, M., 133.

Clog almanack, 41.

" Code," etymology of, 10.

Cords, knotted, 36, 40, 75.

Corean alphabet, 79.

Creation tablet, 100.

Cretan hieroglyphs, 151, 166, 176.

linear characters, 155, 158, 159,

166.
Crete, Mycenae and, 164.
origin of vEgean civilisation in,

^73-'75- . .

relics of script in, 47.

Syria, Egypt, and, 144.

Cuneiform writing, 81-102.

discovery of, 84-88.

meaning of, 81.

mode of, 89.

Cursive characters, 196.

Cypriote's syllabary, 161.
Cyprus, civilisation in, 162.

Darius, 85, 87, 115.

Delia Valle, 81.

Delphi, 146.

Deluge tablet, loi.

Demotic writing, 105, 115, 194.

De Rouge, 125, 129-131, 204.

De Sacy, 84.

Determinatives, 77, 90, 93, iii, 154.

" Digits," etymology of, 92.

Dikta, Mount, slab from, 155.

Diudorus, 178.

" Diploma,' etymology of. 11.

Disease, barbaric theory of, 55.

Edwards, Chilperic, 102.
Egypt and Babylonia, 100.
Egyptian art, 104.

demotic, 105, 115, 194.

hieratic, 105, 113, 115, 126, 140,

176.

hieroglyphs, 38, 103-113.

numerals, 189.

writing, stages of, 105.

Enchorial writing, 115.
Eshmunazar, sarcophagus of, 127,

139.
Eteocretans, too.
Europe, continuity of man in, 22,

171.
Eusebius, 124.
Evans, Arthur, 24, 47, 139, 144, 160,

171. i74i 176-

Fingers as pictographs, 92.
Flinders Petrie, Professor, 105, 160,

167, 168, 182.
Frazer, J. G., 174.

Gardner, Prof. P., 143.
Goulas, 146.
Graecia Major, 179.
Graffito, 145.

Grave-posts, Indian, 48, 50.
Greek alphabet, 179.

papyri, 178-185.

settlements, 178.

signary, 167.

Grotefend, Dr., 85, 92.
Gurob, 160, 182.

Haddon, Professor, 18.
Halevy, 94.
Haynes, 98.

Herculaneum papyri, 181.
Herodas, mimes of, 182, 184.
Herodotus, 36, 84, 88, 121, 124, 125,

172, 179.
Hieratic writing, 105, 113-115, 126,

140, 176.
Hieroglyphic wheels, 42.
Hieroglyphs, Cadger's, 52.

Egyptian, 103, 113.

Hittiie, 136, 152, 159, 163, 164,

17G.

INDEX.

207

Hicroglvphs, Mexican, 67.

Hilpreclit, Dr., y8.

Hittites, 102-164, 167.

Hortman, Dr., 41, 48, .50, 58, 61.

Hogarth, D. 0., 144.

Horus, :4^.

Hui.cing expedition, piclograph of,

57. 59-
Hutchinson, Mark, 30.
Uyksos, 108, 140.

Iberian signary, 168.

Ideographic stage of alphabet, 35,

66-72.
Ideographs, 92, 105, 108, 109, 152.

comparative, 113.

Indian and stolen loaves, 15.

census roll, 05.

chief, pictograph of life of, 61.

grave-posts, 48, 49.

petition for fishing rights, 63.

Innuit record of departure. 66.
Inscriptions, cuneiform, 82
Ionia, 175.
Iroquois, 46.
Isis, 118. 143.
Uzcoatl, 72.

J-

Japanese writing, 78.
esus, Sajin£s of, 185.

Kahun, 160.

Karian signarj', 168.

Keane, Professor, 90, 173.

Kenyon, Mr., 180.

Klein, Dr., 133.

Knosos, 147, 173.

Knotted cords as records, 36, 75.

Latin alphabet, 36, 179, 195, 196.
Layard, Sir A., 89.
Legends in genesis, origin of, 102.
" Letters," etymology of, 10.
" Libel." etymology of, 10.
" Library," etymology of, 10.
Linear signs, Cretan, 154, 158.
Lion weights from Nineveh, 132,

'35-
Love-letter, pictorial, 53.
Love-song, pictorial, 53.

Magic through writing, 15.
Mahaffy, Professor, 82, 88.
Malacca, East, ib.
Mallery, Colonel, 58, 67.
Man in America, 68.
ISIaneh, 130.

Mariner, \\ illiam, 13, 14.
Marshman, Dr., 75.
Masons' marks, 148.
Maspero, 94.
Mathews, R. H., 27.
Max M tiller. Prof., 9, 165.
Mayas, script of the, 68-71.
Medicine-man, song of, 54.

bad, 55.

Mediterranean signary, 167, 171, 176.

Memory-aids, 34.

Memphis, 125, 170, 182.

Menes (?), tomb of, 106.

Mexican hieroglyphs, 67.

Military expedition, pictograph of,

61, t's.
Milk-stones, 145.
Minuscule, 34, 197.
Mnemonic stage, 35, 36-46.
Moabite Stone, 131, 132, 134.
Moses, legend of, 96.
Mycena;an civilisation, 168-170, 174.

relics, 47, 159, 165.

relics in Sardinia, 171.

Nagari, 16, 79, 186.

Nebo, 15.

Nebuchadnezzar, 85.

Nestorians, 188.

New Zealand totem-marks, 48.

Niebuhr, Carsten, 83.

Nineveh, 89, 90, 132.

Nippur, discovery of oldest-known

writing at, 98.
Nuffar (see Nippur)
Number of words from letters, 9.
Numerals, 188, 191.

Odin, 16.

Ogam characters, 202.
Ogmios, 16.
Ormuzd, 87.
Osiris, 107.
Oxyrhynchus, 184.

208

THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET.

Palxography, Greek, 180-186.
" Paper, etymology of, 10.
Papyrus, 10, 114, 115, 180.
Papyrus 0/ Ani^ 108.

Prisse, 115, 127, 131, i39i '80.

" Parchment, etymology of, 11.

Paternoster, 73.

Pausanias, 172, 175.

Payne, 70.

Pelasgians, 172.

Pen, antiquity of metal, 11.

Persepolis, 81.

Peruvians, 36, 69.

Philae, obelisk at, 118.

Phoenician alphabet, 138, 170, 176,

177, 186, 192.
characters, 122, 124, 134, 137,

13Q, 160, 168.
Phoenicians, 162, 170, 176.
Phonetic stage of alphabet, 35, 72-

74-
Phonogram, 35.

Pictograph parent of alphabet, 25.
Pictographs of man, 33.
Pictorial stage of alphabet, 35, 46-

66.
Picture-writing as charmj 18.
Picture-writing, illustrations of, 33,

53. 54, 56, 57. 58, 59. 60, 61, 62, 63,

65, 66, 76
Pinturos, Maya, 70.
Planetary signs, 92.
Pliny, 122.
Poole, R., 139.
Praesos, 145, 167.
Precepts of Ptah-Hetep, 115.
Prehistoric art, 22.
Pre-Phoenician civilisation, 168.
Prcusia, 166.
Ptolemy III., 121.
Ptolemy V., 119, 121.
Ptolemy XV., 112.

Quipu, 36, 37.

Rain-charms, 30-33.
Rameses IIl.j 163.
Rawlinson, Sir Henry, 85,
Rebus, 72, III.
Reinach, M., 171.
Renan M., 133.
Rhys, Professor, 203.

Rock-paintings of Australian na-
tives, .25-27.

Rock-paintings of Bushmen, 28, 29.

Rock-paintings of North Africa
(Algeria), 31.

Roman alphabet, 34, 195.

capitals, 34, 196.

- — type, 34.

Rosar)', 36.

Rosetta Stone, 85, 116-121, 163.

Rosetta Stone, inscription on, 130.

Runic alphabet, 198, 201, 202.

Runic letters, 94.

Russian alphabet, 194.

letters, 94.

St. Patrick, 196.

Sardanapalus V., 15.

Sardinia, 171.

Sargon I., 96, 97, 163.

Sassanid inscriptions, 84.

Schliemann, Dr., 143, 165.

Schoolcraft, 48.

Seal-stones, engraved, 47, 145, 151.

Semang rain-charm, 33.

Semitic characters, 126.

Signary, Greek and Mediterranean,

167, 176.
Siloara, Pool of, 133, 137.
Skin disease, charm against, 19.
Spencer and Gillen, 27.
Stele of Canopus, 121.

Shera, 105.

the Vultures, 97.

" Style," etymology of, 10.
Syllabaria, 94.
Syllabaries, 35, 93, 155, 161.
Symbols, 36, 66, 92, 109, 147—150.
Sympathetic magic, 20, 56.

" Tablet," etymology of, 10.

Tallies or tally-sticks, 41.

Tasmanians, 25.

Tattooing, 47

Taylor, Canon Isaac, 35, 71, 90, 93,
112, 113, 122, 126, 128, 132, 135,
130, 140, 180, 187, 197, 201, 203.

Tellel-Amama tablets, 99, 100.

Tell-el-Hesy, 160, 162.

Thoth, 15, 114, 120.

Tiryns, 173, 175.

Tonga Islands, 13.

Totem-marks, 47.

INDEX.

209

Trade marks , 46.

signs, 9^.

Trench, Arcnbishop, 10.
Ts'ang Chien, 15.
Tsountas, Dr., 155, 158, 167.
Tylor, Dr., 38, 42, 50, 73, 74, 78.
Tyre, 124.

Ulphilas, Bishop, 202.

Uncial letters, 34, 196.

Virgin's Pool, 132, 137.
"Volume," etymology of, 11.
Von Tschudi, 38.
Vowel signs, 84, 113, 192.

Wachsmuth, 173.
Wampum belts, 42-46.
War-song, pictograph of, 62.
Wheels, hieroglyphic, 41.
Whitney, Protessor, 77, 104.
Writing as ma^ic charm, 15.

belief in divine origin of, 15.

value of invention of, 12.

Vahweh, 16, 135.
Young, Dr. Thomas, 117.
Yucatan script, 67.

Zodiacal signs, 92.
Zoega, 117.

THE END.

El:

■. AUG 2 4 1961

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